The Roulette of School
Will Your Luck Hold?
Each time a child is placed in a school, classroom, or row, there is a spin of the School Roulette wheel.
- Get seated next to a kid like me and your learning will suffer.
- Get a sub-par teacher and your learning will suffer.
- Get a new, heavy-handed principal, school board, or governor, and learning will suffer.
It’s a risk that we all know. We cross our fingers and hope, but don’t feel we can control.
But luck isn’t an answer. Thankfully, there is an insurance policy. It’s called Self-Directed learning and it is how the Roulette risk is neutralized.
Learners who know how to learn INdependently and INTERdependently reclaim learning ownership. They know what they want to learn and they can choose to learn anything at any time (even uninteresting school assignments).
In the short term, this ownership will prepare your child to sit next to a kid like me. In the long term, this ownership will insulate them them from a lifetime of job and societal disruption while FREEING parents from a lifetime of worry.
Isn’t that what every parent wants? FREEDOM?
Self-Directed learning is the opposite of traditional school. It begins with a painfully simple question that is never asked in school:
What would you like to learn about, become, do, or fix? — The beginning of Self Directed Learning
This, of course, is more complicated. But not much more. It’s certainly far less complicated than the tasks we put students through today.
Like and follow me if you’d like to learn more of the details involved with Self-Directed learning. It is a foreign concept in school, but it is only foreign because school was not designed with the learner in mind.
More to come.
