If you accept that every person is an individual with a unique path to realization of their passion, potential and choice of occupation, then the term “grade level” is problematic. Every parent should want their children to be a self-realized individual, not a clone of someone else or walking someone else’s path.

It’s a challenge for many to set aside the concepts and frameworks that they grew up within, especially when they never experienced any friction with them. But for those who have been able to step away, they see a remarkable array of unintended consequences brought on by a mechanical system of forced labor and false standards. It will not be easy to put a new system in place, if only for the inertia built up of hundreds of years and billions of unquestioning minds. But try we must.

On testing, it’s time to see statewide or national exams as an academic version of the physician’s vital signs: they don’t tell you everything you would want to know about a patient, but when one of the signs is out of wack, it’s a fair bet that the patient is in danger. I’ve never met a parent who would be sanguine about their own child being unable to read or calculate at something approximating “grade level”.

I know this is far out, but I don’t understand why we continue to have irrelevant teacher centred systems. Kids sitting in a class, most of them bored.

I think the bricks and mortar approach will disappear in the next decade or so and be replaced by social education models where young children learn to play and socialise with each other. In Sweden they don’t start formal education until they’re 9.

After that I think children will be far more social, they will learn from home with online mentoring systems and develop the skill sets they want through intelligent gaming and contacts with peers throughout the world

We already live in this village, but we haven’t woken up to its potential.

My apologies, I am not sure I ever read your comments thoroughly. If I had I certainly would have responded sooner!

I am absolutely in agreement with your end result: “… public ed will be the vehicle to social change.” I would love to see Greg’s vision come true, that the system we currently have reorganizes itself into a new system of student-centered, lifelong learning. How that change will come about for all of a state’s educational system, then the nation, is the question. While I love the vision you lay out that sets up resources and allows students to draw from them as soon as they are aware of their own need for them, I wonder if such a system could ever be put in place with an organic, grassroots effort? I’ve always envisioned a top-down approach in order to bring the benefits to everyone rapidly and—most importantly—consistently across the country (and around the world in my ideal scenario).

Have you heard of any districts offering what you speak about? Certainly the free schools and unschools, and to a great extent, the home schools are offering much of what you suggest. But a public school system?

Thanks again for your contribution, Monika. I have widened my network with some of the resources you mentioned (Greg & Lisa), I appreciate that.

Thanks for sharing! That sounds like a program that was on the right track: student centered, grouped by learning style instead of cohort, progress measured by the individual’s readiness to move on, etc. Just out of interest, do you know if that program still survives? Do you remember if there was any testing, and if so, how it was conducted? And how involved were parents in the classroom or any of the learning? Was there homework?