What if?

What if law makers remembered that eight year-olds watch SpongeBob, and sleep with a night-light? What if they realized that if they can’t find their favorite stuffed kitty, with the scratched marble eyes, and the grey fur that used to be white, that they can’t sleep? What would happen if they remembered that eight year olds want to please the grown-ups in their lives more than ANYTHING at all? They want their teachers to be proud of them, and they want to feel smart. What if they knew that kids don’t want to be taught how to pass a test? They want to be taught that dreams can come true. They want to learn about people who lived before them who had crazy, messy, bold, daring, adventurous dreams, and who followed them even when it wasn’t easy. They don’t care if it’s Despereaux or Neil Armstrong, but they want a front row seat to adventures. Their minds are not small enough for standardized tests. They aren’t confined enough to boxes yet to really do well. No, these minds take boxes, and turn them into castles, space ships, and race cars. We don’t produce innovative thinkers because our education system is designed to take innovation out of learning and standardize it. But the best minds are anything but standard. What if the people shaping public education in the United States remembered that? What if grown-ups stopped trying to impress other grown-ups by how complicated they could make elementary school, and common sense ran the world again? Would the performance over 180 days school matter more than one single test then? What if it did?