From Industrial to Organic
What if the problem isn't that some children fit the current educational system? What if the system was never meant to fit actual human beings?
Originally written February 16, 2022, while I was working in Exceptional Student Education. Spending my days with students who didn’t always fit neatly into the traditional school model had me questioning whether the students were really the ones who needed to change. I’ve cleaned this up from the original writing, but I’ve left the wondering intact.
I keep wondering why we expect something as wildly individual as a human child to thrive inside a system built around sameness.
Look around. We have gotten really, really good at making things uniform. You can travel across the country and eat at many of the same restaurants, order the same hamburger with the same three pickles, walk through the same giant stores, drink the same coffee and stop at the same gas stations. The highways are standardized. The signs are standardized. The exits are numbered. Everything is designed so you can move from one place to another with as little disruption as possible.
And honestly, that's convenient. You can move from one city to another, take another job and pretty seamlessly recreate much of the same life.
But what did we trade for all that sameness? Where is the excitement of finding something you have never seen before? Eating something you have never tasted? Discovering something that exists only in that particular little place?
Because there is one thing we haven't managed to mass-produce very well.
Nature.
Drive across the country and the landscape changes whether we want it to or not. The trees change. The bushes change. The flowers change. The elevation changes. The smell of the air changes.
If you've only lived in Florida, you may never have watched an entire mountainside turn red, orange and yellow in the fall. You may not know what it feels like to see daffodils and tulips poking through snow, announcing that spring has finally decided to show up. Live inland your whole life and you may never know the rhythmic sound of water reaching the edge of a continent, the smell of salt in the air or the very particular crash of a giant palm frond hitting the ground.
You have to go there. You have to experience it.
Nature refuses to be completely standardized.
And maybe people do, too.
Yet somehow we created an educational system that often expects children to move through roughly the same material, at roughly the same age, in roughly the same amount of time and demonstrate what they know in roughly the same approved ways. Then we're surprised when some of them don't fit.
Especially children whose brains work differently.
For an autistic child, for example, the environment matters. Noise matters. Routine matters. Sensory input matters. Communication style matters. Expectations matter. And when that child enters a classroom, those differences don't magically disappear because the school has a schedule to maintain.
Maybe the question shouldn't always be, How do we get this child to function better in our environment?
Maybe sometimes the question should be, What could we change about the environment?
That thought keeps taking me back to food.
Our first attempt at educational flexibility sometimes feels like McDonald's. Everybody gets basically the same thing.
Then maybe we get progressive and move to Burger King. Fine. Have it your way. But you're still ordering from the same basic menu.
So maybe we create a buffet. Now we're getting somewhere. Different choices. Different amounts. You can skip what doesn't work for you and take more of what does.
But what if we went further than that? What if we grew the food?
Now every garden would be different. Different climate. Different soil. Different plants. Different harvest times. Different problems. Different solutions. It wouldn't be as convenient. It wouldn't be as easy to duplicate.
That's the point.
Education doesn't have to look identical everywhere in order to be education. And the world we're preparing kids for doesn't look much like the world our current system was built around anyway.
The old formula was pretty straightforward: go to school, behave, graduate, go to college, get a good job, buy a house, start a family, work for decades, retire. Rinse and repeat.
That path still works for some people. But it isn't the only path anymore, and for many young people it isn't even a particularly realistic one.
Technology changes constantly. Entire careers exist today that didn't exist when many of us were children. People can build businesses from laptops, teach people thousands of miles away, create art for worldwide audiences and communicate with more people in five minutes than previous generations could reach in years.
Yet we still sometimes educate children as though the ultimate goal is getting really good at following the existing instructions.
Maybe that's backward.
We talk constantly about teaching children. What if part of education were discovering what is already inside them? What are they naturally interested in? What problem do they keep trying to solve? What can they do for six hours without anybody making them do it? What happens when we stop spending so much energy correcting the ways they are different and start asking what those differences might be useful for?
That doesn't mean children don't need teachers. Of course they do. They need adults who have lived longer, know things they don't know yet and can help them develop skills, discernment and discipline.
But maybe the adult doesn't always have to be the person standing at the front of the room holding all the answers.
There is a teaching strategy called the flipped classroom. Instead of spending classroom time primarily delivering information, students encounter material beforehand and classroom time becomes a place to explore, discuss, create and apply it.
I keep wondering how much further we could flip things.
What if children weren't treated primarily as empty containers waiting for adults to fill them? What if educators were also observers, facilitators, translators? People who notice what is trying to emerge from a child and help that child develop the tools to actually do something with it.
Some children are going to grow tomatoes. Some are going to grow orchids. Some are apparently going to grow some bizarre plant nobody has ever seen before and we're all going to stand around saying, "What the hell is THAT?"
Good.
Maybe that's exactly the one we need.
We've spent a long time trying to make the garden easier to manage. Same rows. Same spacing. Same growing season. Same expected harvest.
And then we label the plants that don't cooperate.
Maybe we don't need another improved factory.
Maybe....we just need a garden!
Organic education. Not mass-produced. Instead, Responsive. Curious. Alive.