Education on a Crash Course

I chose to become a teacher because I value my fellow human beings and because I wanted an outlet for my creative energy.  I truly believe "Man's flight through life is sustained by the power of his knowledge."  I have remained a teacher for these very same reasons.

Now, I am seeing the heart of my profession rot to the core.  Particularly powerful members of the corporate world want to remold education into  a likeness of the business world.  I take offense.   They view their lives as successful and want us all to take some lessons from them.  Money will never be the sole measure of my success.  Standardized tests will never be the sole measure of my students' success.  I don't need their metrics to help me know what to value in life.

Creativity is under attack from every angle.  I am pressured to become a test-prep maven to survive my APPR and help rescue my school.  America did not become great because we are a nation of test takers.  I would also argue that in some cases, the American business model stifles creative outlets and leaves the nation grounded.  I believe most bold, new ideas that propel American business forward come from dreamers and innovators with an unusual creative genius.  These same people as children will be stifled by the Common Core.  While some children can be trained to sit and stare at bubbles and try to understand what was in the head of some distant test maker, other children will stare out the window; their minds will wander.  They will dream.  Some of these children may become the parents of the next great idea, but their test scores will never show it.

I would like to provide a brief example that has great personal relevance to me.  There once was a great grand uncle who worked in a bicycle shop as a mechanic.  He wasn't a scholar in the true sense of the word and he didn't have the highest degrees to show for his intelligence, neither did "the boys" who owned the shop.  They were dreamers, but they, unlike most dreamers, did not learn in life to dismiss their dreams.  They learned to power them ahead. 

They decided to build a new contraption, a flying machine.  They put out requests to the automakers of the day for a one-of-a-kind engine.  They sent specifications of its necessary weight and horsepower.  I can only imagine the looks on the faces of those corporate Americans when they read these requests for a unique engine.  I can well imagine their disbelief and merriment.  I picture those letters ripped up or crumpled as balls in the garbage cans of corporate America.  They had no time to slow their assembly line in the name of a bold, new idea.

"The boys" were not discouraged.  They worked hard and pressed on.  They had a practical man, an engineer, in their shop, a great grand uncle.  He believed in their dreams, too, and, I know he believed in them.  He put to work to build that engine with relatively simple tools.  He built an engine with less weight and more horsepower than the one specified.  No one was dangling huge sums of money before him to do so.  The motor that moved him was not money.  When the boys went off to Kitty Hawk to make history, he stayed home and tended the shop for them. 

He never flew in the machine.  The one time he nearly did, he yielded his position to a military man, army lieutenant, Thomas Selfridge, who wanted to do the same.  Tragically, the plane crashed on that day.  Selfridge died and Orville  was seriously injured.  In an era in which it would have been highly unusual for a man to cry, this first airplane mechanic shed tears, fearing Orville was near death.  He survived.  "The boys" told their mechanic he was too valuable to risk putting up in the air.  He stayed grounded, but his engines soared.

The creativity that powered these men ahead was a combination of practical knowledge and seemingly crazy dreams.  I despair because our common-core curriculum and the sea of test bubbles that accompany it seem to put creativity and this very same kind of ingenuity on a calculated crash course.  America would not have become great without this ethic of our ancestors, their penchant to dream and a dose of some good, old American ingenuity.  Without these things, we would not have mounted up with wings.