Educating for Human Greatness

Discovering and Developing the Potential in Each Student

by Lynn Stoddard and Anthony Dallmann-Jones, PhD

We must stop trying to standardize students in our schools. Making students alike in knowledge and skills is not only impossible, but negative and harmful as well. It introduces school as a place that automatically focuses on children's differences as inconvenient and undesirable deficiencies. What does this approach say to children? "What you know, who you are, and what you can do is not important to us. We will teach you to read as quickly as possible, then you can learn the things WE think are important for you to know and be able to do." What a terrible way to introduce formal education: It is a morbid and futile path we have set for our teachers and perfectly explains why our schools are in trouble.

We have found a better way — nurture Positive Human Diversity. This is the message from a group of master teachers and parents who are proposing a decisive — yet realistic and refreshing — reformation plan called Educating for Human Greatness — a positive and proactive plan that has been six years in development. EfHG empowers teachers to perform as respected professionals with knowledge and skills rather than as subordinate workers who do the bidding of policymakers who not only don't know the students, but they have never even met them! Teachers should partner with parents and aim to meet the needs of individual students rather than the needs of decision-makers far removed from classrooms.

We have found that students have more potential than we have ever thought they possessed. We also know that student potential can grow exponentially when teachers aim at developing assets that children bring to the classroom. So much of this potential remains hidden and undeveloped because schools are not organized for students to explore and discover their unique talents and gifts. In stark contrast, our schools are organized and operated to standardize and to make students as much alike in knowledge and skills as possible. Student achievement in a prescribed curriculum is the main purpose and goal of conventional education as indicated by the scope of the testing and retesting being currently required.

The Educating for Human Greatness group is proposing a different, more enlightened purpose for public education. With the following purpose we aim to reverse the trend of our country to incarcerate more people per capita than any other country for a cost of nearly 50 billion dollars a year. School dropouts form an unnecessarily large part of the prison population.

MAIN PURPOSE OF EDUCATING FOR GREATNESS
Develop the qualities of human greatness —
help students develop their own unique assets —
and employ them to be positive contributors to society.

PRIORITIES — Seven powers/dimensions of human greatness:

1. Identity — The power of self-worth derived from developing one’s unique talents and gifts and using them to benefit society.
2. Inquiry — The power of curiosity and effective investigation.
3. Interaction — The powers of love, human relationships, communication and cooperation.
4. Initiative — The power of self-discipline and intrinsic motivation.
5. Imagination — The power of creativity in its many forms, including innovative problem-solving. The arts and other disciplines are used to nurture and expand all forms of imagination and creativity.
6. Intuition — The power of the heart to sense truth and develop emotional intelligence.
7. Integrity — The power of honesty and responsibility.

Curriculum as a Tool, Not as a Goal

One unique feature of the Educating for Human Greatness model is a different role for subject matter content. Thousands of subject matter topics are used as "tools" to help students develop the seven powers/dimensions of greatness. With curriculum as a tool it is not a rare thing for a student to master or become a genius in something in which s/he is especially interested. It starts in elementary school with students becoming geniuses in everything from aardvarks to zeppelins. Often times a child will excel in two or three topics in one year doing "Great Brain" research. (Stoddard 2010) Using the seven powers of initiative, inquiry, identity, interaction, intuition, integrity and imagination, students accomplish some amazing things. A typical example is the third grade girl who wrote the music and lyrics for a song she played on the piano and sang for her report on dinosaurs. This led her into a study of how pianos are made.

Identity, the First Priority

Perhaps the most important thing a person can learn in life is who s/he is as an important individual with many unique talents, gifts, and abilities to develop and use to benefit society. Competence and humility are both developed in the quest for identity.

Educating for diversity promotes greater student achievement and makes education meaningful, relevant and inviting.

We cannot overemphasize this. An example is the great difference in learning that occurs when reading is taught as a tool of inquiry rather than as an end in and of itself. When reading is taught as a tool of inquiry, children fall in love with it and do it as often as they can. On the other hand, when reading is taught as a task, children grow averse to it and avoid it like poison. (See Stoddard 2010 p.125)

There are numerous advantages for nurturing positive human diversity rather than trying to attain human uniformity. We made a list of 14 advantages, but in the interest of shortening this paper we mention only four:

1. Every child can excel in something if given support, understanding and encouragement by caring adults.
2. Learning is deeper and more enduring when it occurs as a result of personal inquiry.
3. Teachers rise to a new level of performance, with enthusiasm and creativity when invited to nurture positive human diversity.
4. Sudents learn basic skills in a natural way, without pressure, each at a time that is right for him or her. They become voracious readers.

Fostering Extraordinary Teaching and Learning

Requiring teachers to spend their professional lives on impossible, as well as meaningless, tasks is hardly the intelligent way to draw out the best that is in them. Ask teachers instead to do what is productive and very possible. Ask them to nurture positive human diversity. Our country is making a gigantic mistake pursuing standards for student uniformity. Are high standards important? Certainly, but let's be intelligent and prioritize them. Rather than having high standards for student uniformity in knowledge and skills, let us emphasize high standards for optimizing individual talents and knowledge gained from personal inquiry. Teachers get excited about this because it makes teaching more enjoyable, yet challenging, more important, and meaningful.

If you want to draw out the best that is in students, recognize and appreciate them as important individuals with unique talents to develop and interests to pursue. Perhaps the greatest stimulant for great teaching and learning is to assess student growth in curiosity and imagination. According to a recent issue of Newsweek (July 19, 2010, p. 45), creativity scores in the Comprehensive Torrance Creativity Index have been steadily declining in this country. Creativity, of course, confers the ability to solve problems, be entrepreneurial, develop software, invent, provide visionary leadership, as well as make intelligent decisions. In other words, it is the lifeblood of our country.

The decline of creativity can be directly attributed to the fact that the purposes of present-day public education basically ignore it. Instead, the aims are fixed narrowly on student achievement in a fixed core of (supposedly) essential knowledge and skills that was introduced by a Moravian bishop, Jon Amos Comenius, over 350 years ago. If we measure student growth in the powers of inquiry — the power to ask and pursue great questions, and if we measure imagination and creativity, we automatically call forth a different kind of teaching than is normally found in conventional schools. Teaching for student inquiry and imagination will revolutionize schools because both teachers and students will be engaged in things that are meaningful and things they enjoy doing. Attempting to teach a person something they are not interested in is nearly impossible. How about trying to teach 30 people MANY things in which they are not interested? When you think about it like this you wonder, "How did we get painted into this corner?"

Whatever the reasons, we have been doing it since the mid-1500s. It is past time for a change. The signs are clear: The classroom teachers themselves will tell you that our main focus in education today is past unreasonable. It has now become ridiculously silly — all this testing to prove that someone was better at forcing outdated content than someone else. If that is not enough of a reason for change, consider our dropout figures now being at an all time high: 7000 dropouts for every school day, every year. We are NOT reaching our students. We are even pushing them out of school where they are unreachable. That is tragic!

In our book, Educating for Human Greatness, we share some ways to nurture curiosity (inquiry) and all of the seven dimensions, or powers, of human greatness. In the book there is a Tool for Assessing School Effectiveness in Helping Students Grow as Contributors to Society. This instrument assesses what schools should be held accountable for. We believe teaching and learning will rise to a higher level if we assess student growth in the powers of inquiry, imagination, identity, initiative, interaction, intuition and integrity. Memorizing assigned subject matter is held in short-term memory long enough to pass the test, while learning from personal inquiry lasts a lifetime. Student development of the seven powers of greatness changes everything!

We believe it is time to stop trying to patch up an obsolete school system. We need to develop a brand new one. While there may be other alternatives to the stampede toward standardization enforced by faulty and narrowly focused tests, we are fully confident that Educating for Human Greatness is a good start toward creating the schools we so desperately need. Students, parents and teachers are crying for it. Many are ready to rebel against education for student uniformity. The time has come to begin the exciting process of truly reinventing education.

For more information see efhg.org/ or email Lynn Stoddard or Anthony Dallmann-Jones. Also read Laurie's article Is Homeschooling a Way to Avoid Brain Drain?.

Stoddard, L. (2010). Educating for Human Greatness. Sarasota: Peppertree Publishing.