What Can We Do About [t? 209

What Can We Do About [t? 209 And don’t tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend most of the year preparing him to fill in a few bubbles on a standardized test. I don’t want teachers to be teaching to the test. I don’t want them uninspired and I don’t want our students uninspired. Uh huh. Did he change No Child Left Behind? No. Of course not. Test- ing dominates education as much as it ever did. All presidents are the same, really. They can’t fight the vested interests, or won’t. I will avoid figuring out why here, although, once again, John Dewey had much to say on the subject of how governments stay in power by making sure that people aren’t really educated. We can’t count on politicians, but here is what we can do. We can build it and then we can work inside or outside the system in such a way that allows people to be able to come. But how do you build a new high school system? Very simple: one curriculum at a time. The trick is making sure that you put the curri- cula online. We cannot change education one school at a time. Many good schools have been created over the years. Today, John Dewey’s Lab School (in Chicago), which was entirely a learning-by-doing place, is now a college prep school. Having a few reasonable schools will not change the system. A curriculum offered online is available to every- one and eventually can provide an alternative to a system that offers boring and mindless education. In addition, online means choices. Once we create dozens, may- be hundreds, of curricula from which to choose, students should be able to learn anything they want to learn without regard to whether a teacher for that curriculum or other students interested in that cur- riculum happen to live nearby. So, in an ideal world, what would these curricula be about? They can be about anything that one can learn to do in the real world (which would leave out all the traditional academic subjects). They should teach teaching cognitive processes, of course, but one should not endeavor to teach cognitive processes specifically, that is, apart from their possible use. So, it is the use of these processes in some area of real life that would be the intent of any full-year, story- centered curriculum. These curricula and any others that we would design have the following characteristics: HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023955