Joe, we’re talking about education, here. You have GOT to stop being so reasonable!
That said, I have to disagree strongly with your confidence in “the science of learning,” which is in its infancy and simply doesn’t produce anything like the same kinds of repeatable results one finds in biology or physics, for example.
I understand your point about “learning styles,” but I really wasn’t talking about that. The debunking of learning styles was inevitable because the theory was ultimately simplistic. That said, there is no evidence to suggest that the majority of children are equally able to learn the same things at the same times in the same ways.
“Commonly agreed upon benchmarks” in education have always been highly mobile. They have never been established scientifically the way that things like evolution or climate change have been established. Outside of certain professional education circles, there is no scientific consensus on the kinds of math a third grader should be able to understand.
But let’s say there is. Let’s say that 98% of child cognitive development scientists said that we know exactly the kinds of math we should be forcing elementary school kids to perform (again, simply not the case), the fact that a student should be able to understand something in no way creates a moral imperative for the student to demonstrate that understanding, or to do the work the adults insist upon so that they can convince themselves that the student understands the math they’re forcing them to do.
This is because individual personalities are never taken into consideration when adults decide what they are going to force kids to do. So a kid who is uninterested in performing the tasks adults are forcing on them is made to feel less intelligent, less considerate (teachers are often obviously frustrated by students who aren’t performing the way the adults expect them to), less worthwhile, than the kids for whom doing the things adults want them to do feels like the right thing to do.
Sorry, I’m rambling and sounding like a crank, I’m sure. I just think the talk of standards and common core misses the fundamental truth that there are lots and lots of perfectly intelligent, curious kids in school who are miserably unhappy because they can’t be the people the adults need them to be in order for the system to work well for the adults.
