Our Current Educational Process Ignores the Way Children Learn

The following is the text of my comment to a blog post by Diane Ravitch. The subject of the post was a response from one of her readers, “a Professor of Neurology, Pediatrics and Psychiatry,” who suggested that “all of the initiatives of the last nearly 15 years, not only Common Core, are failing also because they ignore the brains of developing children and all learning theories relevant to education.”

The Professor is correct that the failure of educational reforms over the last fifteen years results, in part, because the educational process does not take into consideration the way children learn. I would add that this problem has gone on for far longer than the last fifteen years in both private and public education.

The current educational process, in public schools throughout the US does a poor job of assessing where a child is when they arrive for their first day of school re: their developmental readiness for learning and understanding academic subject matter. We then compound the problem by starting students off at the same point of embarkation and expecting them all to move from lesson to lesson at the same speed and proficiency. This process sets children up for failure and humiliation because they are pushed ahead to material for which they are poorly prepared. As children experience failure, it begins to affect their self-esteem and makes learning a stress-filled process rather than something that is both natural and fun. With each new lesson that teachers are expected to present, the students find themselves further behind until their little minds begin to shut down. Learning has ceased being fun and children begin to think of themselves as failures. Children are very much like the rest of us in that, as soon as we realize we can never win the game we decide not to play. In the case of children in school, they are no longer willing to try.

It is correct that our focus on testing in much of present day public education has exacerbated the problem but we have been teaching children the same way for generations in our public schools. We seem more concerned with the pace at which children learn rather than whether or not they actually do learn.

If we stop to think about how young children learn anything, they do it at their own unique pace, applying trial and error in an environment that is totally supportive, non-threatening, and in which failure is not even contemplated. Learning to walk and riding a bike provide helpful examples. What matters is not how quickly they learn but that they do learn and, within a short time, children are able to demonstrate the comparable levels of proficiency. The fact that the process of mastering the skill was easier and happened more quickly for some students is totally inconsequential.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I show the reader how our current educational process chews children up and spits them out. I suggest an alternate approach. It is an approach that allows children to commence from their unique starting point and to progress, from lesson to lesson, at their own pace. The focus is on success and what matters is that every child progresses along their unique learning continuum as far as they are able. As a child experiences success, we can begin to raise our expectations for them.

Our objective is not that all children arrive at the same place at the end of twelve years of formal education rather it is that what they learn they can actually apply as they proceed through the balance of their lifetimes; lifetimes that are nothing more than an extended learning continuum, unique to each individual.