ON EDUCATION: STOP STEALING DREAMS by Seth Godin

If you follow me on Twitter @irene_latham, you know that some of my favorite things to RT are sound bytes by Seth Godin. (I email subscribe to his blog.) He may be writing for businesses, but I find much of his advice applicable to my daily life. He's been on my Ideal Dinner Party guest list for a while.


And now he's written a 30,000 word manifesto in easy-to-digest blogpost-like entries about the state of education in the United States, called STOP STEALING DREAMS. You can download it for free here.


As a mom who has first-hand experience with public, private and home-school, I can say without hesitation that school as we know it fails our children in a multitude of ways. (Don't believe me? Watch the movie WAITING FOR SUPERMAN.) And as a parent who wants her kids to grow up as passionate, creative, lifelong learners, I found myself nodding my head A LOT.

Like during this passage:


"Here are a dozen ways school can be rethought:

Homework during the day, lectures at night
Open book, open note, all the time
Access to any course, anywhere in the world
Precise, focused instruction instead of mass, generalized instruction
The end of multiple-choice exams
Experience instead of test scores as a measure of achievement
The end of compliance as an outcome
Cooperation instead of isolation
Amplification of outlying students, teachers, and ideas
Transformation of the role of the teacher
Lifelong learning, earlier work
Death of the nearly famous college"


And this one:


"132. What we teach

When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions.
When we teach a child to love to learn, the amount of learning will become limitless.
When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete.
When we are brave enough to teach a child to question authority, even ours, we insulate ourselves from those who would use their authority to work against each of us.
And when we give students the desire to make things, even choices, we create a world filled with makers."

READ IT.  And thank you, Seth, for writing it.