“Schools are already redundant. They just haven’t realized it yet.”

I inscribed those words on a gifted copy of Homegrown by Ben Hewitt to a friend recently.  I had forgotten writing those words, and, as so often happens in life, I had come to forget why they’d been written.  But life also has a way of bringing the truth to the surface again.

And the truth is that I still believe schools are redundant.  I’ve started to describe my current school as my last – not because I am old but because I can’t see another school truly wanting to move beyond the structures that keep teachers and students imprisoned in a top-down system of oppression.

In short, what we believe and value in learning is exactly what we don’t do in schools. 

We believe that learning	BUT, we actually
Is inspired by personal interest and agency.	Tell our students what, when, how, and why to learn.
Can’t be measured only by answers on a test, blanks filled in, or 500 word essays.	Rely on quizzes, rubrics, and standardization because they’re easy to measure.
Is limitless.	Limit learning to 50 minute blocks separated by bells.
Occurs at different rates for different people.	Move the class together as one block at one speed.
Is often defined by failure and trying again.	Evaluate student work and hand it back with a ‘mark’, only to move to the next evaluation.  Sometimes we don’t even let the assignments leave the school…
Should happen in the real world, with mentors, community feedback, and in public view.	Set assignments that have nothing to do with the community and have no relevance to real life.

Much of the above thinking is summarized so much more coherently than I can write it by Will Richardson in his latest Tedx Talk.  Ben Hewitt even goes so far as to describe schools today as a form of oppression, citing the fact that the things that are so key to our very survival (growing food and building shelter, let alone creativity and free thought) are exactly what schools don’t allow for.  

As Seth Godin states in Stop Stealing Dreams, individual thought is dangerous to the school system.  Thus, schools will continue chugging along to redundancy.