Posted on Leave a comment

Check the label

I have been out for a couple of weeks. Not out physically, out mentally. It has nothing to do with the holidays. I haven’t done any shopping, and the tree isn’t up. I love this time of year, don’t get me wrong, I just have a lot to think about.

One thing I have been thinking about for several weeks now is the phenomena of labels. Special education, special needs, gifted, talented. Doesn’t it seem that everyone needs to be labeled these days? What if you’re not any of those things? Does that leave you “normal” or “average?” I know a few things about kids, and one thing I’m fairly certain of is that no kid goes to bed at night dreaming of being average. I think regardless of their circumstance in life, they go to bed dreaming that tomorrow brings possibility. That is something we lose somewhere on the Road to Reality. Unfortunately, that Reality is often defined by the limitations we impose on ourselves. Sometimes that Reality is imposed on us by those who think they’ve been trained in Reality Management.

If you Google “Special Education” you will get 149,000,000 results. It is an industry. If you Google “Gifted and Talented” you can choose among 5,510,000 results. Perhaps less of an industry, but a cool new buzz-word, just the same. I often wonder about the risks of informing children that they fall into either of those categories, or perhaps that they are neither.

In a society where things (and people) need to be efficiently processed, labels are the best use of time. In a society where parents find themselves unable to cope with the needs of their children, labels are a necessity. Labels make things easier. We know what we’re dealing with. We know what to prescribe or recommend. We are label-crazy.

And how do you get a label? You take a test. There is a great article (Washington Post) floating around the alternative education space about a prominent and successful Florida businessman who sits on the board of a local school system. He decided to take the standardized test administered to 10th grade students in his district. Of the 60 math questions, he knew none of the answers, but managed to guess 10 correctly. His score on reading was 62%. This man has a B.S., two masters, and is working towards a doctorate.

Of course, the argument could be made that had he been a 10th grade student, the material would have been fresh, and he would have fared better. He counters this by pointing out that the subject matter should have some practical application in real life. What we are doing is testing children on trivia and then shaping their futures based on the answers to the trivia questions. Standardized testing is supposedly about holding teachers and schools accountable for education. But what occurs instead is “teaching to the test.” What benefit this serves a human being is yet to be seen. In fact, those of us that opt out see it as incredibly dangerous.

I don’t live in a bubble, I have many friends and acquaintances in the mainstream schooling system, and I hear anecdotal evidence nearly on a daily basis that this standardized learning approach is sucking the life out of, well, learning. I know of one situation where a student took a state standardized test and scored very well in math, putting the student in an accelerated course, about a grade ahead. That same student now requires weekly private tutoring to keep up, at his parents’ expense. That, to me, is a “Huh?” moment. If you do well on, say 60 questions, does that mean you are ready to tackle another whole year of content? Or, if you answer only 10 of the 60 questions correctly, does that mean you need to be slotted back to square one?

Alternatively, I know of another bright young person, who never experienced one iota of trouble with his school work, that scored poorly on the reading comprehension portion of a standardized test.  Much to his parents’ horror, he was placed in a remedial language class.  He now spends hours of his free time hunched over repetitive and insulting worksheets, often in tears.  By the way, he speaks and writes two languages fluently.

Many teachers and parents get this, they understand that the situation is ridiculous, but they feel helpless and unable to change the status quo. The alternative education movement exists for a reason, and it isn’t only homeschooling that leads the way. There is a grass-roots movement to bring back education to the community and to put families back in charge. The Free School model is taking hold and gaining relevance. This threatens the status quo, and the new educational models will be challenged. I honestly don’t know who will win. I think a system that is failing will ultimately crumble, but it won’t go down without a fight.

Then again, neither will I.

This post was originally published on 12/09/2011 at Angela’s blog Raising Autodidacts.

Photo by Harold Reed. Playing school. Burwood, New South Wales, Australia. 1940.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *