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Next, I would love for each of you to respond with a comment to this particular post. Please tell us of one experience in the school setting, or in the context of education, in which you felt a disservice was being done to you or someone you know. Identify what you think was wrong with your scenario, and offer a solution as to how we could fix it. I think it is important to begin the debate from a place we can all relate to, our own experiences.
Here's one for me: I was a straight A student from ninth grade all through college. Always "a pleasure to have in class". I would even venture to say that many people believed me to be quite intelligent. I soared through college with flying colors, and received letters of recommendation, scholarships, and even private compliments about my "potential" from professors. It was only a few weeks after graduation that I realized how little I really knew and understood about the world. I was so busy reading from my syllabus, doing the work assigned to me, writing essays that answered the prompts in every way possible, etc. that I never really noticed just how narrow the breadth of material we went over was. Besides that, I had trusted my professors to give me objective knowledge and employ critical thinking (wasn't that what they preached?). I wasn't really presented with an acurate picture of "the other side". After two years of pursuing education on my own (and I have taken great pains to entertain all points of view), I hold a very different and more complete world view than I had during my prime in college. And I feel more connected to my understanding as well, like I built it and it wasn't just translated to me from someone else's mind. Honestly, I felt duped and shortchanged about my college experience...
Another thing that bothered me was that I was afraid to do anything at work that I wasn't given explicit directions for. Anything I made a decision to do out of sheer common sense was a potential mistake in uncharted waters, and I was very unsure of myself. I now attribute this to the very active role many of my teachers took in over-explaining their expectations to me and outlining standards and rubrics which spelled out step by step how to achieve and succeed. As a substitute now, I see this is a common thread in classrooms: children striving to gauge and perform to the (sometimes arbitrary and often narrowing) standards of the adults around them. As a student it wasn't about using common sense, or even logic, it was about memorization and completing the outlined task at hand. I was the pinnacle of success in school, and the picture of inferiority in the real world...
I will wait for your posts before I offer any solutions to this problem, as I want to avoid directing the debate.
Your example can be more specific than this, or even about someone else, but I just thought I would start us off...
Thanks!
Danielle
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