Ask any parent and they will tell you one of the most difficult moments in raising a child is the moment you send that kid off to school. For most parents almost all of that fear is centred on primal emotions connected to all of the unknowns that will affect their child while they are not under their supervision. But for some parents, like Jennifer Fink, that fear is based on the degradation she has been seeing in her 8-year-old son’s spirit ever since he started going to school three years ago.
Jennifer wrote an emotional op-ed recently for The Washington Post, and the following is an excerpt: “My 8-year-old son has been struggling in school. Again. Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school — Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. — have been grating on him, and it shows. His teacher recently emailed me; she’d noticed a change in his behavior (more belligerent, less likely to cooperate) and wanted to know if there was anything going on at home. My guess, I said, was that he was upset about having to be back in school after break. I was right.”
You can read Jennifer’s entire op-ed piece by visiting WashingtonPost.com. Her own personal experience is certainly nothing new — the corrosive degradation that young children across North America endure under the standard common core K-12 education system has been going on since before the end of the American Revolution, beginning around the year 1750. In its current form the K-12 system conditions our kids to see the world through left-brain, data- and fact-oriented tunnel vision.
This criticism was brilliantly explained by renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright in a rare audio interview recorded on June 18, 1957 when he was 90 years old (you can listen to it in full below). He discusses the merits of having been a life-long rebel, and the importance of art, religion and philosophy on his work and in his life.
It’s no accident that someone with such a groundbreaking design-oriented mind as Frank Lloyd Wright would have such wisdom into the structural problems that are found inside our education system. In a brilliant feature written for The Atlantic, Jon Freach explains why we need to steer our education system more towards a right brain-oriented “thinking outside the box” direction. Freach argues that integrating design as the third pillar of our K-12 curriculum is the first step. For decades, the foundation of our schools’ curriculums have been anchored on two pillars: the sciences and the humanities — and that needs to change. You can read his excellent essay in full by CLICKING HERE. And to learn why exercising our right brain is so fundamentally important to making our world a better place, all you have to do is watch Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor‘s mindblowing TED Talk below.(Photo via Flickr).
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