Imagine a school that is structured around helping kids become taller. Measurements are made at the end of every month or term. The ones who haven't grown much are anointed for further work.
Remedial classes if it's a conventional school, or "extra care" if the school likes its alternative, child-centred label. This could be hanging from bars for ten-minute intervals, or extra protein in their diet, or both, with a few more things thrown in.
And then the child has a growth spurt entirely unrelated to any of it, and we celebrate.
We are four and a half years into running our own school, and I keep wondering if some extraordinarily high percentage of well-meaning interventions at school are basically this. Teaching a child to grow tall.
They are doing it on their own, perfectly fine, thank you very much. And it happens on its own very non-linear timeline, with plateaus and surges.
Take reading. We still don't know what's happening in the brain when we start to read. (What we currently know from what brain regions light up is as good as knowing that pasta or paratha get made in the kitchen.)
But we have entire approaches with their own camps of supporters. And obsessive measurement of literacy, and the bemoaning of a crisis of literacy.
What if it is because of how we are measuring it, and then pathologising the absence of what we think are sensible markers of ability?
Kids will learn to read and write and do maths when their brains grow, when they are able to connect experiences, and when they find meaning. But with our anxious measurements, we take meaning out.
Play, experience and exploration are all tough to measure and therefore get squeezed out. Most of our work goes into making these central and visible, and defending them very passionately.
Sure, just like we need to ensure a good diet, we can curate a culture and space that allows for exploration and experience. And also know how to provide the right sort of help when kids need it (phonics, concrete before the abstract, etc.).
But these narrow teaching tools cannot take up all the oxygen.
What's central is still life in its multisensory richness. And so much more so in the AI age!