Responsible Children? What Madness?

Ever since NCLB legislation, the spotlight has been on educators. Having taught in the inner city as well as suburbia, I’ve seen two extremes–neither of which ever fault the learner, which is politically, socially, and educationally taboo today. Some schools constantly watch the educators, faulting them for every [terribly calculated] statistical dip in (sometimes terribly planned) academic “performance” (assessment). Other schools are finally beginning to recognize (for the first time since NCLB…and so the pendulum swings…) that it is not just a matter of constantly faulting teachers for poor academic performance. The fact is that we are in a field of professionalism where we do not have the opportunity to pick and choose the “best materials” with which we can create products. We are handed imperfect, unsupported, attitude-injected children whose guardians may be lazy, selfish, and feeling entitled to public education handouts while communicating a sense of disregard for education itself because free public education where children can’t be left behind if they don’t take any responsibility will, inherently, fuel this cycle to produce more lazy, selfish, leeching adults (sorry for the run-on). We’ve somehow adopted this crazy-talk (based on legislation) where teachers are the only ones responsible for “passing” students along rather than fostering responsibility. We’ve embraced a deification of humans–humanism–where we’ve convinced ourselves that we can mass produce generations who can achieve the same basic skills (a high enough test score) if we only try harder and raise proficiency percentages. Can it be done? Who knows–maybe 2014 will tell; or maybe by that time there will be some new “safe harbor” way of twisting statistics to invent success for the sake of political reputation (so much for scientific process–expected, perhaps, from trying to test millions of variables at once).

The educational systems throughout the world which work well (according to results like the TIMSS) often foster at least some amount of competition where, if the child does not come to terms with the responsibility which is his/hers within the educational process, they will quickly learn that responsibility elsewhere within the bounds of a trade or simpler work–you might say they’ve been “left behind,” yet still learn the same lesson within an alternative environment. Maybe it’s the difference between giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish, even if it means leaving him by the bank of the river, hungry, for a while.

Thankfully, there may be a coming shift in where the educational pendulum is headed once again. The focus is now turning to individual growth rather than predetermined benchmark achievements (though currently still very much based on these–PVAS is one example of this determination). Some schools are placing more of an emphasis on support in the home–from parents, for example (shocker, right?)–in order to foster successful children. Hopefully this sense of community will allow the old addage, “it takes a village to raise a child” to ring true once again.