Race to Nowhere

We're showing The Race To Nowhere tonight at The Post Oak School. It is a film that documents the results of an educational system dominated by test scores as its ultimate result. High test scores = Achievement. Unfortunately, the drive to garner high test scores, good grades, and admission to highly selective colleges has
D E R A I L E D education.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton

Are we losing our soul?

changing education paradigms

Click here to watch Sir Ken Robinson ("if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original")in an RSA animate production.

toddlers' favorite toy: i-phone

Here it is without comment.

self-respect

"Folks today have ... got this idea that self-respect means 'I am a terrific person. I am wonderful. Me, me, me.'

That's not self-respect; that's vanity."

--Bessie Delany, American dentist and civil rights pioneer

Comic-book making instead of calculus?

Students direct their education at Manhattan Free School

That is what people FEAR Montessori education to be: comic-book making instead of calculus.

It is not.

E.M. Standing collaborated with Dr. Montessori on the book Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work. The chapter about elementary education includes this section:

Freedom of Choice Must Still Be Based on Knowledge…Some of the new educationists—says Montessori-- in a reaction against the old system of forcing children to learn by rote a tangled skein of uninteresting facts, go to the opposite extreme, and advocate giving the child “freedom to learn what he likes but without any previous preparation of interest….This is a plan for building without a basis, akin to the political methods that today offer freedom of speech and a vote, without education—granting the right to express thought where there are no thoughts to express, and no power of thinking! What is required for the child, as for society, is help towards the building up of mental faculties, interest being of necessity the first to be enlisted, so that there may be natural growth in freedom.”

Here, as always, the child’s liberty consists in being free to choose from a basis of real knowledge, and not out of mere curiosity. He is free to take up which of the “radial lines of research” appeals to him, but not to choose “anything he likes” in vacuo. It must be based on a real center of interest, and therefore motivated by what Montessori calls “intellectual love.”


Montessori was a revolutionary thinker. And she pointed to the middle path: FREEDOM...within limits.

what you do

"It is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings."

--From the "Ask Ann Landers" American advice column

punish the curious

"It's easy to underestimate how difficult it is for someone to become curious. For 7, 10, or even 15 years of school, you are required to not be curious. Over and over and over again, the curious are punished."

That's from Seth Godin in his book Tribes.

Yesterday I dropped by two classrooms. In the middle school math class, students were divided into groups of 4. Each group was engrossed in conversation -- and experimentation -- trying to change the orientation of a parabola.

Then I visited a lower elementary classroom (1-2-3 graders, age 6-9 years old). The teacher struck a little chime to get children's attention and announced, "It's time to put away your work and to line up for recess." Three pairs of children said at the same time, "WAIT! Can we finish what we're working on first?"

Or as one of our parents asked after the first day of school, "What do you put in the water? I've never seen children so eager to get back to school!"