I always hated kits.
My Cub Scout career lasted two meetings. The handbook for knot tying was so much less interesting than my own efforts to hang the dog from a low branch, only to have the slipknot slip. I wasn't an animal abuser. He was the only nearby heavy object with a collar. Fortunately, my knot experimentation came to fruition later, when I learned how to suspend a backpack with cheese in it from a tree branch so as to save my dinner from the bears. I invented the clove hitch. (Although modesty requires that I admit that I was probably not the first).
I hated model airplanes. I did like the smell of the glue, so my dislike of the kits probably saved me from a serious addiction. Anything with numbered parts and instructions continues to irritate me. When assembling various toys and appliances over the years, I try to put things together by sight and logic and refer to instructions only when stymied. I know . . . it's stupid. Kits and instructions are convenient and save time and trouble.
But not in education.
It's a lovely thing to have childhood biases confirmed. My innate inclination was affirmed by the recent report on the relative benefits of Lego kits vs. Lego "free play." The findings were not surprising to me from either an innocent child or skeptical educator point of view. Children who play with piles of Legos, inventing and building as they wish, exhibit far more long-term creativity than children who build things from Lego kits. It is clear that rearranging Legos from a messy pile is a better learning experience than working from a kit with directions (unless you're in a hurry and hope to use the finished Lego product as a household appliance).
In the political cacophony over the Common Core, this fundamental understanding is seldom, if ever, heard. The Common Core and other iterations of standardized expectations and assessments turn the powerful joy of discovery and experimentation into the model airplane kits of 21st century education policy. (Unfortunately, the glue part too, as too many adolescents self-medicate to avoid the tedium and stress of current school practice.)
Most folks who study child development recognize the importance of play. This is widely understood - if not broadly enough applied - in early childhood education. But as is true of most things in education, a little understanding is turned into a lot of kits. In our commercialized educational culture, the simple idea of play is monetized, with very intentionally designed materials and sequences of "play" packaged in colorful, highly promoted "innovations." This is profitable, but unnecessary. Good nursery schools, pre-schools and kindergartens provide raw materials with which small children construct knowledge, exercise the fantastic and create marvels that adults might never imagine.
This understanding of discovery, exploration and imagination is endangered in today's early education environment, threatened by pre-academic work and developmentally inappropriate expectations. That's bad enough, but discovery, exploration and imagination are nearly extinct in primary and secondary education, smothered by standards, direct instruction and assessments that presume children will have learned by the kit and must operate according to the instructions they've been given.
The stuff of learning - the stuff of our world - is like piles of Lego. Letters, words and numbers are symbols of magic. Letters and words represent thoughts, experiences, stories, feelings and opinions. They can be crafted into nearly infinite combinations, uniquely expressing the complex ideas of the builder. Despite centuries of previous craftsmanship, a lone poet can combine a few dozen letters into an utterly unique evocation of human existence.
Numbers can be manipulated and twisted into wondrous algorithms that come as close as humanly possible to representing something true about our physical universe. Even now, in this supposedly advanced stage of human civilization, new windows into physical reality are invented every day by people who have been liberated to imagine what has not been previously conceived.
The Common Core and other "standards" are not de facto toxic. In a superficial, overly-ordered way, they describe the broad intentions of most educators, even those of us who are proudly progressive. But the practices they drive are educational learning kits, whether in the form of commercial curriculum, including the Advanced Placement disease, "methods" of one kind or another, or the dreary pages of most textbooks. This dreariness is then compounded by standardized assessments, which reward those who diligently follow the kit's instructions, and punishes those who dare to rearrange the numbers, letters and words into their own unique expression of knowledge and understanding.
This is the cardinal sin of current education policy. When children learn from kits they will become as bored as a child who never tried to suspend her dog from a tree or write her own story. It is not coincidental that intrinsic motivation erodes steadily as children move through school.
Policy makers and politicians cite the need for entrepreneurs and innovators. Then they drive sterile policies and practices that have children completing worksheets, complying with teachers' directions, sitting silently, respecting their elders.
They say we need problem solvers. Then they adopt policies that train children to get the answers right on a test, punishing any risk taking or original thinking.
They say we need leaders and then they design systems that reward kids only when they blindly follow.
They say we want visionaries, but don't have time to hear children's ideas.
They use trite phrases like "thinks outside the box" to describe qualities they admire, and then present children with boxes to check and scold them for coloring outside the lines.
Today's children will find that tomorrow's problems are piles of letters, words and numbers without kits or instructions. Since education has becoming increasingly standardized and instructed, they will not have the faintest idea what to do with them.
How crazy is that?