Rethinking School Chapter 3: You can't make the earth go around the sun faster

 You can't make the earth go around the sun faster

If your child is struggling, there may simply be an incompatibility between the child's maturity level, and the grade/year of school in which they're placed.

Even the most rudimentary observations of the natural world reveal that biological organisms mature at widely varying rates.

We've been so conditioned to accept the pattern of infancy, toddler, preschool, elementary, middle, high school, college that it's almost impossible for us to break out of it and think: What makes me think that this tiny human being should mature on the exact same schedule as the rest of the tiny human beings born at the same time?

Why age = grade? It's Prussia's fault.

Beforw about 1850, teachers in American schools taught mixed-age groups together, in one room, with no standard curriculum. Students just moved to more difficult material when they were ready, at widely varying times. But over in Prussia, a new system had been instituted in the early 1800s: smaller classrooms where students were grouped by age and led by a single teacher. This strategy wasn't driven by educational research; it was an attempt to try to restore Prussian military might, after a humiliating defeat by Napoleon. Struggling to rebuild, Prussian statesmen decide to organize schools like military units, in order to instill the will to fight and build pride in Prussia's pugnacious national culture. Students were organized into platoons by age and assigned to a single 'squadron leader," a system that made the transition into military service quite straightforward.

In 1843, Horace Mann, Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts, visited Prussia to tour its schools. At that time, multi-age classrooms required huge resources, and scores of talented, energetic, and flexible teachers. The Prussian system struck Mann as the perfect answer: the very best way to channel a large number of diverse students into a single institution with maximum efficiency. With Mann's support, the Prussian system was introduced to Massachusetts in 1847, when the Quincy Grammar School was built with twelve separate classrooms, each room for a single, age-graded class, led by a single teacher.

The new plan did indeed turn out to be highly efficient (factories generally are), and age-graded schools were soon spreading. By the turn of the century, age-grading was the norm in almost all of the nation's "common schools."

Here's your first task: Try to put aside your Prussianized assumptions about grade level, and ask yourself, "Does my child belong in another grade?"

Three questions for evaluating maturity

When confronted with schoolwork, does your child shut down, show anger, cry?

Does your child struggle in some areas and sail through in others?

Is your child small or large for his or her age?

Age-grading is based in a mean, mean is simply one way to express "average." In math, you find the mean by adding a list of numbers together and dividing then by the number of numbers. Here's what's important about that: Often, the mean is a number that didn't even appear on the original list. There may be no students who are actually at this mean. 

Action plan

Forget about a single age-grade calculation, and take some time to think carefully about your child's maturity levels. (Use Bauer's Maturity Levels Table).

Consider your options for single-subject acceleration or deceleration.

Consider your options for "gapping" your child.

It's much better, both for the child's self-esteem and overall development, if you can allow them to step completely out of the system for one year and do something else, and then guide them back into it with an additional year of maturity. A gap year is not the same as being "held back"; it is a positive step forward.

Saduran dari: Bauer, Susan Wise. 2018. Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education (Chapter 3).