Teaching and Learning

The human mind is exponential in its capacity and potential. When a
human-- especially in the youngest years-- is authentically engaged in
an inquiry or activity; when curiosity, imagination, authentic interest
and focus are applied to a self-initiated objective-- there are not
boundaries for the amount of learning which can, and does, naturally
occur. The human mind is a thing of astonishing capacity, even beauty,
mirroring and matching the amazing complexity, beauty and sophisticated
harmony of the world and universe about us.

We, as a culture and in our most established and conventional ways of
perceiving and executing the mandate of bringing our children up the
best way we can imagine and create, have determined that the best way to
equip young minds with the most valuable and essential knowledge and
skills they will need to succeed in their future and this world, is to
determine what that necessary knowledge and skill-base is, and "insert"
that content "into" children's minds. Their thoughts are expected to align with
the assigned content and imposed learning objective, usually also
imposed upon the teacher, and school as a whole, by ever-higher forces
of "standardization" up the chain, culminating in appropriately-named
"standardized tests" which tend to be held as the ultimate and
imperative goal to which all schools must aspire to "raise" students'
minds. The ultimate goal, then, is standardized minds. One size fits
all.

This is the way most conventional and accepted (because it
is what most of us experienced in our own childhoods, after all)
education, both public and private, is executed. We closely measure how
well our schools succeed at producing successfully-standardized minds.
We bemoan "failing schools", in which minds are unsuccessfully
standardized, and prize our privilege if, as in most of our region's
public and vaunted (expensive) private institutions, our children are
sufficiently molded to prove (through their performance on the same
standardized tests taken by their contemporaries in all other schools)
that their minds have been very successfully standardized, that their
knowledge and performance meet the criterion set-out by the powers at
the top of the chain of content-creation.

All of this is built upon a series of assumptions, starting with a core thesis that the
boundaries of learning, of what "should" and "must" be learned, can be
defined, and must be forced "into" young people's minds. This appears
to make sense, primarily because it is how education has been
administered in our culture for the nearly 200 years that our public
education system has been in existence.

But the assumption that there are defined, and definable, boundaries of what specifically should
and must be learned, belies the limitless capacity of the human, growing mind. Assuming that certain, specific things must be learned, and can only be learned when taught bya professional trained in the specific content areas they are tasked to
insert "into" young human minds, occurs at the specific expense of what
the young human mind might focus on, engage with fully and
authentically, and deeply learn, if they are given the freedom
and opportunity to use that time (including the time monopolized outside
of school-hours by homework) to choose, themselves, what they are
interested in and want to learn.