Getting my kids up earlier than any of us wanted, going to a place they really didn’t want to go and all the rest got me thinking how I would do it differently. When I try to solve a problem, I always start at point b. There’s no point in trying to solve a problem you can’t identify and it starts with identifying a clear goal.

 

So, that was my first challenge. What do we really want out of school? I didn’t ask what I wanted out of school, I was trying to figure out what everyone wanted from school. It sounds like the impossible task, but there are a few things pretty much all of us want.

 

 

We want to be healthy. We want to be financially secure. We want to have some quality relationships.

Does k-12 directly focus on these things? Short and long answer. No. K-12, like college, mostly focuses on filling time. It’s nobody’s fault just the way we’ve always done it. AI’s favorite word – inertia.

The problem is while we’re wiling away the day, there are actual things that would be very useful to get taken of like the aforementioned health, money and relationships.

The question educators and most people have is this what school should be? My answer is it should be whatever constitutes the best use and obviously tackling life’s three major concerns would qualify.

So, I thought I had the problem solved because I had identified the proper goal. All school had to do was focus on these three things and all would be well. But, I missed the biggest problem. Force.

Force was the one ingredient, like everyone, I just thought was a necessary part of the equation. It never even dawned on me that school could be successfully done without some form of coercion.

I was wrong.

Like always I looked at point b which took a little time to find. How are people going to learn the mountain of information they need to survive without someone making them do it? I started weeding through what school thought was necessary information and realized it was almost all trivia and not necessary at all. The mountain of information people supposedly need? It was imaginary.

I realized all we really need is reading, writing and basic math to function in society. Additionally, I realized that force feeding biology, geometry, english lit, sociology, etc was actually an impediment to growth because it made kids equate learning with pain. It made kids resent school and caused them to have bad behavior they might not otherwise have.

It didn’t mean I was anti learning, quite the opposite. I was anti force feeding which was the root cause of why kids didn’t want to learn at school. No one, at any age, wants to learn what someone else thinks is important.

So, now I saw school in a completely different light. I realized that the falling behind myth was just that – a myth. All this false sense of urgency did is make us, and our children, unnecessarily stressed.

This meant there was lots of time for kids to do whatever they wanted because what they really needed to know was very small and they really should be spending most of their time playing with their friends and socializing.

This is where I developed the thimble of knowledge concept.

The concept is very simple. School convinces us that we need a smattering of information about a variety of subjects to be successful, but life tells us we need a depth of knowledge about a couple things to be successful. These two concepts require completely different approaches.

The school approach is memorize and forget a lot of unrelated things. The life approach is obtain a deep understanding about a particular subject and you will succeed – at least financially which is a big step. Once we are financially stable, we can explore the things that interest us without the stress of having the bills always looming.

The other thing that happens is college, and its big price tag, becomes unnecessary for most people because without the thousands of hours devoted to needless trivia, we can focus on the hundreds of hours it takes to become financially successful which is the real reason people go to college.

To sum it up as simply as possible, what I learned on this journey is that the mission is wrong in school. We’re trying to make people the undefinable well educated when what they really want is to be successful. These require two entirely different approaches and the chief cause of why there is so much animosity between school and the community.

 

 

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