We face a fundamental dilemma in which educating for democratic character is being defeated by a system that prefers meaningless obedience.
I wish I were exaggerating!
While our STEAM rhetoric and whole-person pedagogy is supported by research, the administrative reality often holds a frozen flag that finds no breeze—textbooks and worksheets rigidly aligned to the test. Then adding insult to injury, we're told these practices are research-based!
We’ve chosen the "efficiency" of delivery and assessment over the fluid, sometimes messy process of education that builds from youngsters’ true needs and experiences and then opens their eyes to the wonders, beauty, paradoxes, and complexities of profound truths that contain their opposites.
The Root of the Closed Culture
Perhaps the most difficult hurdle is that this isn't just a policy issue—it’s a cultural one. From the time teachers are students, until their graduation from teacher-prep programs, they live in the model of a "closed culture." They work to pass tests and not to learn to navigate the complexity at the heart of the process of becoming more profoundly and sensitively themselves!
This culture prioritizes:
Alignment over Agency
Conformity over Values
Assessment over Imagination
Delivery over Discovery
Unitary truths over Complexity
When we train educators from age 5 to 25 in a linear, teach-to-the-test model, then ask them to break that model, we have stifled the very development we know leads to thriving because we haven't nourished trust, inquiry, meaning-making, grit in the face of complexity, and purpose.
These are the practices learning research supports and schools ignore as they proclaim they are research based.
Is there a way out? Of course there is, but only when we acknowledge that we are putting institutional efficiency over human development. Once we see this, we will ask the questions we must to humanize our schools.