Less Measurement, More Joy

A famous business consulting adage states, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." And we love managing things, especially children's education.

We use grades to manage learning progress. What if we just told students what they're doing well and what they can work to improve on without adding a grade at the end? They'd probably be more curious, more intrinsically motivated, and less anxious. But then we couldn't manage it.

We use standardized tests to manage the content and quality of the education itself. Without them we'd have more time to focus on actual teaching and improve education quality. But we can't trust individual schools and classrooms to do that without managerial oversight.

Increasingly, we set curriculum goals down to the specific activity, even having the students themselves recite and focus on these goals. If we didn't tell them that their reading was intended to teach new vocabulary and test their critical comprehension, if we just let them read for enjoyment, well then we wouldn't know if they're learning anything.

The more it feels like educational outcomes are sliding, the more we want to manage the details and try to fix the problem. We seek to create a controllable input-output process that will identify and correct deficiencies in a systematic way. This works well in factories, so why wouldn't it work in schools?

Because our children are not widgets. They have preferences and passions, and because they're also not school administrators their passion isn't to become a well-educated output product. 

They want to be seen. To be trusted. To be entertained and energized. They want to learn things because they think those things are awesome, not because it's the next step in their education process.

The more closely we manage education, the more it feels like a robotic joy-sapping responsibility for the learner themselves. And that's why more and more students disengage and our educational outcomes get even worse.

One can only conclude the solution will be to start measuring that. <insert facepalm emoji here>

Sebastian 3/31/23