Last week, I wrote an article for TODAY Newspaper entitled “Success in spite of school, not because of it.”
I received many comments, both online and in person, about my view that if the education system continues the way it is, we are headed down the path of mediocrity. Now is the time to begin paving the way toward excellence and greatness.
The most insightful remark I received came from a good friend of mine who’s a teacher.
She responded to my observation that “schools generally teach students to fear failure, to be obsessively competitive and to be a passive learner.”
She wrote:
… the fear of failure begins in the teacher. That’s the root of the issue in our education system. One of the indicators to measure a teacher’s performance is the student’s results.
More often than not, the teacher is blinded to the student’s fear of failure because it is more daunting to come to terms with the fact that the fear stems from us [teachers].
When we deny our own condition, we fail to see what is happening in the student because it reminds us of who … we really are.
It’s entirely true that what gets measured gets done. But when it comes to measuring our teachers’ performance, are we measuring the right things?