I imagine…

I am imagining a place where children with a rage to learn get taught something new and exciting each and every day; Where children are not told that developmentally they are incapable of learning something simply because of their chronological age; Where children do not go to school every day terrified that they will get into trouble from misbehaving when the frustration of their improper educational fit outweighs the developmental maturity of their self control; Where children don’t go home after school and learn to hate themselves by rationalizing that they must be bad people to behave that way, because they cannot understand why they don’t fit in and why the world is so frustrating for them; Where they are able to move at their own pace through material and not have to wait “patiently” for others to catch up; Where their enthusiasm for sharing the knowledge of a passion is not seen as “showing off,” but rather the beautifully intense intellectual pursuit that it is; Where their classmates share their same intense passion for learning, complex thought processes, advance vocabulary, and extreme emotional depth; Where if they get a concept after the first or second attempt, they do not have to do 50 homework problems to “prove” it, thereby killing their love of what was once their favorite subject; Where other children find reading the fine print of the playground rulebooks are as fascinating as they do and are fair and just to each other in honoring those rules; Where teachers respect their wonderfully quirky nature as part of the package of what makes them the fabulous humans they are and do not pathologize and try and “fix,” or worse, drug them; Where people don’t tell them that the only friends they can have are kids their own age, and if they cannot be friends with kids their own age, there is something terribly wrong with them; Where educators nurture children through their internal struggle rather than ignorantly quoting Dweck when the children’s innate perfectionism paralyzes them; Where children can ask questions freely and not be seen as disruptive; Where all the children are excited to actively partake in deep philosophical debate and discussion that may seem as off topic but is actually advanced integrative exploration; Where complex ideas are considered doable projects, not naïve fantasy; Where children are respected for WHO THEY ARE, not what people or books say they should be… This place needs to exist… stay tuned…

~Sharon