Rigid curriculum keeps students from realizing potential

On Oct. 28 the Deseret Morning News published a piece by Doug Robinson that was a chilling reminder of how the teaching profession is being inexorably destroyed by politicians as they carry out another in a series of government mandates for teachers to try harder to standardize students.

In "No teacher will be left standing," Robinson eloquently described the plight of teachers who are victims of the latest law. He reiterated what most of us know: It's impossible to make people alike in knowledge or skills. When we try to do it, we cheat students from realizing their great individual potential.

After 36 years as a classroom teacher and elementary school principal, and now as a consultant, I believe I have discovered why teachers can't act as professionals. Instead of serving the needs of students, teachers are required to serve the needs of politicians.

The stumbling block is curriculum. Our society stubbornly holds to the notion that every student can and must achieve a certain minimum level in the officially sanctioned curriculum. Teachers can't serve the needs of individual learners as long as student achievement in curriculum is viewed as the major goal of education. The needs of students are so varied that a standardized curriculum won't work.

Grade-point averages and letter-grade report cards keep us chained to a faulty mindset. With this view, teachers can't act as professionals. They can't assess student needs and work with parents to make decisions about what is best for each child. They can't help children discover and develop their unique gifts and talents. Neither can they invite autonomous student inquiry to make learning exciting and fun. Teachers, students and parents are in bondage to an imposed curriculum. All are demoralized and creativity is smothered.

A solution to this dilemma is to change our society's basic belief about subject matter content. Teachers, parents and students can free themselves from bondage to curriculum and those who use it to control teaching. They can do this by adopting human greatness as the main purpose of education and by employing content as a means, rather than goal.

In other words, if we are to improve education in any significant way, curriculum must shift from the role of boss to that of servant — the servant of teachers and parents — not the servant of politicians. It is imperative and urgent that the curriculum monkey be lifted off our backs.

In my new book, "Educating for Human Greatness," I give the details of how this can be done. Basically it means a major mental shift from trying to standardize and make students alike to valuing and nurturing their wonderful diversity — shifting to help each youngster discover and develop his or her unique set of gifts and talents — the opposite of what we are doing now.

With this focus teachers can act as professionals again. Parents can become meaningfully involved in their children's education. Most important, learning can again become a joyous activity for students, and each can excel in his or her own special ways.

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Lynn Stoddard is an education consultant living in Farmington.