What About Life??

I haven't added anything in here in a while, but this evening something grabbed at me and here is the result. I felt it was appropriate to post here as it is my own fiery opinionated view. My passionate grab at what would make for a better world, a wish list that might not be as good as it seems at the time I embrace it, and therefore part of my political and social profile, that part of us that truly shifts with our inner compass, gets tossed about by world winds and events:

Years ago my father repeatedly played a song "Little Boxes" - and I had no idea how much it influenced my life, but its theme recurs at various times again and again and again. (Listen to it here.)

I'll start with a quote from an article in a recent Framingham Patch which prompted this blog - on the revision of the MCCAS and PARCC testing for Massachusetts public school students; one regarding the vote to approve the revision of current standardized testing to a new standardized state assessment system:

“Their vote paves the way to a next-generation assessment that will be a better reflection of student achievement and, at the high school level, of readiness for college and a career.”

College and a career. Here is my shout.

What about life? Life? What in our public school system supports and prepares children to take on their lives? How do they develop the ability to tell when they are on the right track for them? How do they learn to pay attention to their own inner abilities and innate talents? How do they learn to follow their own path and express their own uniquely beautiful contribution into the world? Not from a system designed to produce factory workers. One focused on input and output, societal systems and making the uncomfortable shoe fit. One that says – oh play music alright, but have a career – and to do that, go to college. Congratulations on vomiting out another year of students who will take the next twenty years to discover that the paths they were taught to walk on are not the right paths for them. They are not the paths that lead to listening to their own inner voice and expressing their own gifts and talents into the world that so desperately needs them – they are the paths of … college and a career – something to make money with, not a life. Not a life.

Who teaches them about happiness, inner clarity, being in touch with who they are so in 25 years they will look back and be content, not careered? How many of you out there have changed careers? How many are truly happy with your careers? How many spent time and money pursuing that which is not what their lives are really about? How many have reinvented, and made a new life that works, financially and personally?? How many have paid the price of health and happiness in pursuit of college and career? What are we teaching – that we cannot do what we love and make money doing it? That we cannot be who we want to be, it’s not practical; it won’t guarantee financial success in life and college will? A big LIE.

Standardized tests are like the MDR’s (minimum daily requirements) in the vitamin world. They are the MINIMUM requirements for a pre-package life. They have been determined to be that which is needed to keep their recipients from death in the records, not support them in living. They are designed to make the current school system look like one that works. The only thing we can accomplish with predetermined testing is a child’s ability to fit into the standard “shoe” – absolutely nothing about what the child is capable of, nothing to do with how sensitive the child is to that capability and how supported they are in achieving it. Our system is broken. It makes broken lives. Ones that are ticky-takied onto the outside, harden and crack over time, disintegrating around the core human being inside somewhere down the road, which becomes the time when they really begin to live their own lives – or disintegrate personally trying to do so. Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually nurtured our children so they could navigate their own true course. Gave them skills instead of standards, support and opportunities to be individuals instead of psychotherapy and drugs to enable them to fit in, make the grade, ace the test…

We are in the throes of a generation sold on the marketing principle of the successful life. All god’s children go to school. All god’s children get good grades. All god’s children have careers. That is what parents want. That is what they have been told equals success. And so when the shoe does not fit we cut off a bit of the heel, or a toe….the real tale of Cinderella is how desperate her sisters were to fit into that which was not their shoe. God help us. God help our children, and preserve them from the lies we believe.