A Note on Standardized Education: For My Nephew, who Sings Himself to Sleep

My little nephew, Benjamin, doesn’t stay at his Mothers’ Morning Out program during afternoon nap time. He kept talking to himself for such a long time before falling asleep that he perpetually disturbed the other children. So my sister picks him up early, and he naps at home. Now he’s transitioned, however, from talking himself to sleep to singing himself asleep. For an entire hour before falling asleep, he sings “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “The Wheels on the Bus” and “Jesus Loves Me” and whatever other songs he knows.

For an hour.

The upside to this little habit of singing and talking is that Benjamin has an incredibly advanced vocabulary and mastery of syntax compared to other almost three-year-olds. The downside is that he doesn’t fit into typical programs that require silence at nap time. 

When my nephew was still crawling, I asked my sister never to send him to public school. She isn’t likely to (she was homeschooled and graduated at fifteen). But I worked for several years in public education, and I’m worried about its effects on him. My nephew is precisely the kind 0f child that enters public school with enthusiasm and leaves with a criminal record.

Benjamin at the zoo.

A few weeks ago, I sat down to Skype with Benjamin. When he came on the screen, he said, “I’m learning my ABC’s!”

“Oh, will you sing them for me?” I asked.

He did. After he finished, I clapped my hands and declared with enthusiasm, “That’s fantastic!”

“It’s fantastic!” he responded, with equal gusto about the alphabet and his own performance.

As cute as his reaction was, there is an incredible amount of truth to his statement. The alphabet is fantastic. It’s the symbolic representation of sounds that allows us to make words and write down stories. Without the alphabet, I wouldn’t have a job and we wouldn’t have literature.

What I am most afraid of for my nephew, if he were to go to public school, is that he would lose his enthusiasm for learning, and that his natural instinct to experiment with language and sound would be punished until it no longer exists. Singing isn’t highly valued in the American school system.

When I remember my own experience teaching public school, I catch myself thinking of Walt Whitman’s famous poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

Whitman’s poem illustrates that even such wonderful things as stars can become boring, depending on the educational methodology employed. In the U.S., it is the focus on standardized testing that is making teachers and students “unaccountable tired and sick”—sick of learning turning into test preparation, sick of reducing the beauty of the world to a multiple choice question, sick of data being more important than children. It is this unaccountable sickness that I want my nephew to avoid. 

The problem is that standardization kills precisely the kind of interest and curiosity that is most necessary for learning. What lawmakers fail to see is that the more we emphasize testing as a method for ensuring that students learn, the more we make students disassociate the content with the actual wonder of the world. The fantastic reality of the stars is reduced to a static exam.

Proponents for standardized education may argue that without these exams, education becomes a free-for-all, without structure or adequate assessment. This argument is the equivalent of saying that the only alternative to a straightjacket is uncontrolled flailing about. The problem is that these people confuse standardization with the concept of limitation—but while limits are a healthy component of education, standardization is not.

Limitations can be the catalyst for creativity. If I gave students a white canvas and told them only to paint on it with blue and black, they would have to be creative with their usage of space, light and dark hues, and brush strokes. But such an exercise—while limiting the materials and outcomes of the project—would provide an environment for unique expression and problem-solving.

However, if I gave students a paint-by-number picture and told them to replicate the original exactly, we would have standardized results, it would be very easy to measure student success, and there would be absolutely no creativity involved.

When I design projects for my students, I ensure that they have limitations to guide and ignite their creativity. But I hardly expect standardized results. I do, however, find that they love what they are exploring and creating. They become enthusiastic about learning. When I taught to standardized tests, I never had a student that professed affection for the exams, and typically, because of years of testing, they were apathetic about learning.

That is not to say, however, that there is no place for standardized tests. But repetitive use of high-stakes standardized tests reduces teaching to its most menial level, and learning—instead of inspiring kids to react to the stars and the alphabet with enthusiasm—makes students “tired and sick.”

Benjamin with his water table.

And so, to my dear nephew, I hope you never come to believe that the world is as dull as all the testing in public schools make it out to be. I’m glad that right now you like to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “The Wheels on the Bus,” and “The ABC Song” for an hour before napping. Those songs are about what adults call astronomy, biology, physics, and literature. And I hope you never stop believing that these things are all rather fantastic.

Because really and truly, they are.