Todd Stanley 
Table of Contents
When you were a child, did you ever play school with a friend or sibling? If you didn’t, it usually looks something like this. Ring a bell, then the math lesson starts. Ring a bell, then reading begins. Another ring and then social studies or maybe science. It was always fun to be the teacher and not so much the student. And yet this is merely a reflection of what kids experience every day in school attempting to become Renaissance learners.
Realism & Renaissance Learners
If we were truly trying to teach something to someone, we wouldn’t be ringing bells, giving tests, or giving grades. For example, if you are trying to teach someone to ride a bike. You wouldn’t teach them the science lesson of centripetal force, stop that lesson, and give them a separate lesson on the mathematical area of a pedal.
You would put it all together because you have to understand the whole picture to do the skill of pedaling a bike. The only test would be success or failure; the only grade is the smile on the child’s face once they figure it out or the crying when they fall into a heap on the ground.
Correcting the Renaissance Learners System
This long-winded diatribe is my attempt at an introduction to a series of five blogs spread over the year when I tear the entire school system down and rebuild it so that it makes sense. This means getting rid of some things we have come to associate as being necessary with schools, but the reality is that these requirements rarely occur in your adult life. My first suggestion; get rid of graduation requirements.
Graduation Requirements & Renaissance Learners
In US schools, we try to make everyone pretty good at everything but great at nothing. Take, for example, our graduation requirements. They force students to take four years of ELA, four years of math, typically three years each for science and social studies, and a smattering of electives, including health, gym, and others. This trickles down into middle and elementary school, where students are expected to have the four core areas at least once a day.
Here is the problem. Not everyone is good at all of these subject areas. Some might be excellent writers and yet struggle with science. Others might be astute at history and cannot think mathematically. The argument becomes these students can get better at these subject areas if they continue with them, but in my experience, there is not that much growth once bad or mediocre in a subject area.
Adequate Education Fallacy
I am always struck by the definition of the education children are legally required to be provided as being “adequate.” Unfortunately, that is the kind of education someone gets when focused on too many things.
What if, instead, we focused on our students’ strengths and made them great at that? For instance, let us say a student has shown a penchant for science but is not as good at literature analysis as it takes place in ELA courses. What if instead of this student taking another couple of years of ELA, she took additional science classes and built off a strength she has shown herself capable of?
Mapping Renaissance Learners to Post-Secondary Learning
Use college as an example. Students choose a major and then devote their time and energy to those courses specific to accomplishing this. They become experts in the area rather than a watered-down version because they have to take courses that do not speak to their strengths or interests.
Why do we insist on everyone taking high-level math courses such as Trigonometry when 70% of what is learned is never used again? Why are we wasting so much time and energy learning something that we will not be used in our real lives?
The argument for taking such courses is that it helps if you consider a career in STEM or the technical fields, but what if you are not? Let those thinking about such a career continue but don’t make those who do not. It is merely a waste of their time and the teachers because they have to teach students who do not want to be in their classes.
Incentivizing Good Teaching & Learning
Another thing graduation requirements do is make teachers lazy. If you teach German, photography, multimedia, or some other elective that students do not have to take, you are pounding the pavement trying to recruit students. Not only that, you are making your class as interesting as possible so that students spread the good word and themselves want to continue with the course next year.
There is no capitalistic tendency to improve oneself because there is no need. They have a monopoly on the class and can do a very poor job teaching it, and the class will still be full the following year.
I once worked for a summer enrichment camp that had it all figured out. Teachers submitted by January possible courses they were going to offer. Students received the course guide in February and had until March to decide what classes they wished to take. If no one signed up for your class because it didn’t sound very interesting, they simply didn’t offer the class.
Realizing Students Aren’t Interested in Becoming Renaissance Learners
Could you imagine if we let students choose the courses they want to take in high school? How many people would choose chemistry, Algebra II, or British Lit? You bet those teachers would make an effort to improve their jobs if it meant not having one because no one wanted to take your class.
Having single subject areas doesn’t make much sense in the first place. In real life, we are not doing math in our jobs until a certain time, and then we switch to social studies. We use these skills as it becomes necessary, meaning they all blend. Yet why do we teach in silos and treat these subject areas as though they are exclusive of one another rather than being all mixed?
Educating for the Real World
The school has broken things down to the point of students don’t know what to do when they need to put it together again. They do their core subject areas independently, and they struggle when they have to combine these skills in the real world.
By the time students get to high school, they should have a pretty good idea of their strong and weak subject areas. Rather than requiring them to continue on a pathway of average learning, what if we allow them to become really, really great? How much better would that student be prepared for college when he chooses a major aligned with this, or in his job, which most choose based on strengths?
