Education should develop individuality through serious work

A system built around conformity should not surprise us when it produces conformity. Give every child the same work, at the same pace, for the same test, and you are asking them to practice being interchangeable. Adding more subjects does not fix that relationship. If the education still has no meaningful connection to the child's goals and interests, you have made the standard package larger without making it personal. We should be developing distinct people who can do serious things with what they know.

A test can reward a child for reproducing an answer without showing whether they can use the idea again. That leaves a serious question unanswered when the course moves on: what has the child acquired that will survive the particular exercise? A record of completed subjects cannot supply the missing demonstration. We need to remain interested in whether the knowledge helps them explain, make, or judge something when the expected answer is no longer sitting among the options.

The common test can also decide what kind of thought the learner practices. If the important task is discovering which answer the institution expects, an individual question becomes a distraction from the safest route to approval. The child learns to ask what the examiner wants before asking what they think. We need work in which their own reason for investigating matters, and in which evidence can reward a conclusion they reached rather than only one they were taught to repeat.

Memorizing for a test just to forget it is an absurd arrangement to defend as education. Memory itself is useful; a person needs knowledge available to think with. The trouble is giving that knowledge an expiration date in the learner’s purposes. Pass Friday’s test and its job is finished. When the subject has no further use in the child’s life, we should question the design before responding with a longer list of things to memorize for next Friday.

A goal changes what the knowledge is for. The child wants to understand a field or become able to do something, and the subject supplies part of the ability they need. They have a reason to return to it, connect it to other knowledge, and notice what they still cannot explain. An interest does not make forgetting impossible. It lets us build a different relationship to the material, in which using it continues to matter after the adult has finished assessing it.

Then let them do projects that require the knowledge. There should be something to make, investigate, or explain whose demands cannot be met by displaying the correct vocabulary. The learner has to decide what matters, bring relevant ideas together, and find out where the first attempt falls short. This is how personal goals can demand more of an education instead of less. A child is trying to accomplish something they care about, and now we have a reason to teach seriously enough that they can.

Interests can change as a child learns more. The useful work stays with them, while the next course can follow a new question or take an existing one further.

I want the child to have something to say after the course is finished, some knowledge they can bring to a question we did not give them. Let the goals and interests affect what they study, then give them work that makes them use it. They can begin becoming good at something instead of becoming better at getting through school. We have far more interesting possibilities for education than producing another person who can pass the same test, and I want us to take those possibilities seriously.