The Direction of Intention

778. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Megan-The-Brilliant sent me a text this morning. She is attending a state teachers conference. Her text said: I’m in a conference where the keynote lecture is on the importance of creativity. Novel, huh? How many times will we say this before we do something about it?

It’s a great question: How many times will we say this before we do something about it? It’s a question that generations of educators have been asking. Literally. Generations. How many times will we say this before we do something about it? Later in a phone conversations she said, “If I hear another person state the obvious I’m going to puke.” She also said, “I’ve had it.”

I’ve heard that a lot lately. The amazing educators, the fire starters, are taking their fire elsewhere. When survival is the best a teacher can do, when thriving is out of reach and dowsing fire is the aim of the system, the choice is to be dowsed or to go make creative fire where fire is welcomed. Think of this: teachers can leave in disgust but students have no choice but to be dowsed. And make no mistake, their fire is being dowsed. And, as levels of absurdity stack upon levels of absurdity, listen to the overriding complaint of businesses about new hires: where’s the self-direction? Where’s the critical thinking and capacity to innovate? Why aren’t we preparing our students for the world of work? Answer: Because we are dowsing their fire with buckets of wet tests to feed metrics that tell us nothing usable. We are patterning them to complacency.

Fire is dangerous to test makers. Educational fire is anathema when answer regurgitation is the goal.

The disjoint between what we know and what we do is vast. It is a farce. If you doubt what I’m asserting, think how ludicrous (sad) it is for a keynote speaker in the 21st century to address educators on the importance of creativity. The speech is only necessary in an arena that has stripped creativity from the system.

After the call with Megan I remembered my recent conversation with Robert. His son is just starting school and he was appalled by what his son’s teachers are being forced to do. He said, “There’s no room for creativity. I’m not talking about art or music – I’m talking about any form of creativity. It’s a wasteland.”

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608. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

I’m reading a book about brain science and how it applies or might impact education. I’m finding the science and discoveries about the brain amazing and yet the application and translation to education is frustrating and sometimes mindboggling.

Marshal McLuhan wrote that we make sense of new technology through the eyes of the past. So, for instance when automobiles first came on the scene we referred to them as horseless carriages. I make sense of my smart phone as if it were simply a telephone and it is so much more than that; I do not know what to call this thing that I carry in my pocket, this thing that has more computing power than the Apollo space crafts. I am squeezing a new miracle into an old idea; I do not understand the power and capacity I already possess.

That is precisely what the authors of my book are doing (and that we are perpetuating in our national non-conversation about education) when applying their ideas to teaching and learning; they are squeezing miraculous insights into an antiquated system. They are addressing the relationship of teacher to student, content-deliverer to receiver, assuming a factory model system in which students are passive and clumped according to age groups in a room filled with rows of desks. They are not challenging the faulty assumptions that their science is revealing. They are attempting to help teachers navigate a standardized test driven system when all of their findings indicate that a standardized test driven system impedes learning.

What prevents us from challenging our assumptions, from actually creating something designed for the times in which we live? That is a rhetorical question. Our challenge is not to improve teaching or to raise standards. Our challenge is to put the buggy in the barn and buy a car. No amount of discussion, testing, debate, or application of new science will make the horse drawn carriage work better in the 21st century. The intention behind the book is to positively impact with the latest science processes of learning, yet it defines learning from a century old idea.

Jill put the question to Seth Godin and he responded with something like this: education will change when the entire community engages in a conversation about the purpose of education (not a direct quote). What is this thing we call education? What is its purpose? If it is, as I hear in our national dialogue and political rhetoric, to make better workers, then we are already lost. Actually, “to make a better workforce” is a perfect statement of a lowest common denominator system expressing its lowest common denominator intention. Design to the minimum, aim for the minimum, and we will hit the minimum every time, no brain science necessary.

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