MY STORY
Saving My Kids from School
Kids should discover, not ignore, their talents in the classroom. BY DAVID BERNSTEIN
WHEN I WAS IN FOURTH grade, in the mid-1970s, my teacher announced to the class
that I was going to be an artist. The truth was
that she didn’t think I had any academic talent to speak of. I was an “ADHD boy” who
couldn’t follow directions, figure out what
page we were on in the book, or turn my
work in on time. With a severely limited understanding of the brain, my teacher simultaneously overestimated my artistic talent
and underestimated my intellectual gifts.
School, particularly elementary school,
was not for boys like me. And, 25 years
later, even the best schools have changed
only slightly. Like many others who deviated from the norm, I learned more from
exploring my passions than I ever did from
a structured school setting. With the help of
numerous mentors, I taught myself to write
op-eds, lead teams, speak, and advocate. I
cared about ideas, not primarily because of
school, but in spite of it. The Washington,
D.C., area, alive with political discourse, was
the perfect place to exercise my passions,
and I moved here in my early twenties to
take a job in advocacy.
Do Our Schools Really Work?
Now I have two boys of my own, neither of
whom has an ordinary learning style. My
teenage son goes to what is widely considered an excellent private school in the area,
with wonderful, committed teachers. But,
like nearly every other educational institution in America, it’s built on an outmoded
model.
I began to question the current model
of education when the headmaster of my
son’s school showed a video clip at a gradu-
ation ceremony of Ken Robinson, speaker,
author, and international advisor on educa-
tion in the arts, discussing how education
kills creativity. Robinson, author of The
Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes
Everything, maintains that we are using
a model of education, left over from the
author Seth Godin re-
cently published a man-
ifesto, Stop Stealing
Dreams, on the need
for radical education
reform. He lays out the
need for a post-indus-
trial educational model
that caters to diverse
learning styles, pas-
sion for ideas, and what
students care about. In
such a school, teachers
are coaches who help
students in a journey of
self-discovery. Students
have a lot of choice in
determining what they
study and how they
study it, in stark con-
trast to the one-size-
fits-all system of today.
Depth is as important,
if not more so, than
breadth. Schools are all
about breadth.
Industrial Revolution, in which schools are
organized along factory lines. “We educate
kids in batches, as if the most important
thing about them is their date of manufacture,” he states in another video on the topic.
Influenced by Robinson, best-selling
Does School Bring Out Our
Kids’ Greatness?
In today’s schools, the “good” students conform, diminishing their prospects for greatness, and the rest end up in an excruciating
battle with themselves, their parents (trust
me on this), their teachers, and a string of
tutors. My job as a parent, I’m reminded by
the school, is to enforce the absurdity of the
current system—to make my kids turn everything in on time—which I faithfully do
because there seems to be no other choice.
