Stop making school easier, please.

Is this the danger of naming things? The more names we have for things the more effort we have to put into learning things names, rather than learning things. But at the same time, it can be fairly easy to learn a list of names, and it's dangerous because to often we stop at learning the name and don't go on to learn the thing as well.

We came up with a name for the faculty of inquiring, asking questions, genuinely wondering...we called it critical thinking. We reified the faculty, made it into a thing we can post on blogs and in mission statements and then forgot to figure out what it means and even worse forgot that this faculty is most exciting and intriguing in our educations in the world.

We want to categorize and label, list and stabilize knowledge, but forgot that the concrete concept-word refers to an unstable thing: to an idea, a flow of energy or sound, or communication. Education is dumbing down into these stabilized things, becoming a learning about what it is to have an education, and less about inquiring into the world. Not that Emile had an ideal education, of course such an education can hardly be mass produced or made available to everyone (or can it? Don't knock it till you have tried it...); but there must be balance, and time and space to inquire. Not to learn the concept-word inquire: how to spell it, what it means when calling the phone company. But, to actually just ask, wonder, be amazed.

But, still the move (caused largely by unqualified teachers like me teaching in standardized settings--rather than organic setting where our lack of qualification/knowledge about how to teach, is made up for by our natural knowledges and abilities to inquire) to replace education with test prep is the greatest tragedy of our generation. More and more courses dictated, replicable, equal opportunity, the same experience repeated and repeated. Stamped, standardized we can now compare what we know this year to what student knew last year, and if the program is really old to what students knew the year before.

But standardized, curved and fitted so we never have a real measure of growing knowledge. Children are our greatest sources of novelty and yet we are putting them through 15 years of replication to stamp out all that novelty.

Education should be a vehicle, not number. It should be a blank sheet, not a letter of congratulations. Education should be life long, not hold your breath and wait to finish puberty...This is one under qualified and over-frustrated teacher.