I’m not alone in my experience of education: I made it all the way through college without discovering what talents, passions, interests, or abilities I might have.
As a result I graduated college with a diploma in one hand and with the other hand scratching my head in puzzlement. What on earth I was going to do with my life? This happened because, for the most part, school is not engineered to uncover a student’s genius. It is designed to uncover and reward specific academic talent.
If you don’t think textbooks, teaching and testing your knowledge of unwanted subjects will strike a chord with you, you might consider staying well away from traditional school. Consider students like Aaron Iba and Nick Perez, who were considered failures in school despite having a passion for and achieving success in their real-world pursuits.
This is a problem people like Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame often points out. He started a movement (learn more at Profoundly Disconnected) to address the problem of a school system and national curriculum that are not designed to prepare students for fulfilling and independent lives. Worse, it completely dismisses, disregards and disrespects them.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Walk into a school practicing the schoolwide enrichment model and you’d find a that every child there develops and shares their passions and talents. They can explain how their teachers, mentors, and helpers in the community help them grow their talents.
Enter a Big Picture Learning school, and you may be surprised to find on certain days their are no kids in school. That’s because they are out in the world about three days a week discovering and pursuing their talents and interests. They are supported by mentors and a school advisory. Rather than sit through a one-size-fits-all standards-based curriculum, students choose seminars that will help them excel in areas customized to their interests. There are standards tied to the student rather than the system.
Unfortunately, in the current standardized, test-dependent public school system, such models are rarely seen or they are relegated to after school programs. Schools are not designed to recognize the genius of those like Albert Einstein. He was considered a foolish dreamer by his teachers, and one teacher even asked him to drop out of his class. That didn’t stop Einstein. He just taught himself subjects he was interested in such as calculus which he began studying independently at age 12.
But what if there was a way to change this for every child? What if there was a way to discover, honor, and develop a child’s strengths, talents, and interests? Isn’t that exactly what students and their parents want?