More on Seeking Potential

The more I think about this idea of look­ing at stu­dents in terms of their future instead of our present, the more I expe­ri­ence two simul­ta­ne­ous yet con­flict­ing emo­tions: hope and futility.

The hope comes when I hear other edu­ca­tors pro­mot­ing sim­i­lar ideas. Bar­bara Barreda wrote today about this, com­ment­ing that when she sees alumni return­ing to her school,

Barreda also refers to an arti­cle by Damien Lopez which argues con­vinc­ingly that we need to think about edu­ca­tion for ele­men­tary stu­dents in terms of prepar­ing them for col­lege. It isn’t that we expect every child to go to col­lege, but that we have to stop assum­ing that cer­tain chil­dren won’t.

Both of these arti­cles high­light the impor­tance of see­ing a child from her future instead of deter­min­ing that future based on our present.

But while I feel hope about the pos­si­bil­ity of see­ing this kind of shift in per­spec­tive, I can’t help but feel that the whole attempt is futile. There are so many forces push­ing back on edu­ca­tors to pre­vent just this kind of think­ing. As just one exam­ple, con­sider the way we eval­u­ate the effec­tive­ness of schools today. The entire sys­tem is explic­itly designed to take our atten­tion and energy off of long term goals and look only at incre­men­tal improve­ments in a few nar­rowly defined categories.

I believe, like many oth­ers, that edu­ca­tion is in the midst of a sig­nif­i­cant change. My hope is that I will live to see a bet­ter sys­tem on the other side of the change. My fear is that the change process will crush my pas­sion for edu­cat­ing chil­dren and drive me out of the pro­fes­sion. My dream is that I would rise above the fear and make some kind of dif­fer­ence. There is a plaque on the wall of my house that dis­plays a quote by Janos Arany, “In dreams and in love, there are no impos­si­bil­i­ties.” May it be so.