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When Conformity Kills Passion

"Never let your schooling interfere with your education," Mark Twain once said. Today, those words are as applicable as ever. These days, learning has become synonymous with that jumble of acronyms we call "school".

    APs, SATs, GPAs. Teacher performance is measured by how well students do on standardized tests. Students are viewed as cold, hard statistics. In between filling out Scantron bubbles and studying SAT strategies, where's the creativity? Where's the passion for learning that school is supposed to spark?

    I attend a high school where 60% of students are at or below the poverty line. Students drop out every month because they simply don't care about school anymore. On the other hand, I know friends who have loved math and science since they were in elementary school. I know friends who enjoy reading classic literature. What happened? When did this gap between the diligent students and the high school dropouts form? The problem isn't that these kids are inherently lazy or apathetic. It isn't that they are less intelligent. The one factor that guarantees academic success isn't genius. It's having a passion for learning – for displaying a natural curiosity about a subject. If you genuinely enjoy learning about a topic, you will do well on whatever test you are given. The academic performance follows the passion – and this passion has to be acquired at an early age. But passion is the last thing our school system teaches. True learning is being devalued in favor of standardized testing. Teachers are being trained to teach to the test, not to the students. That's a recipe for failure.

    When I think about when I first discovered my love for science – and for learning in general – I don't think back to the time when I took the state standardized test in third grade. I think back to when my dad and I used to conduct experiments in the kitchen sink. I think back to when some college students visited my elementary school and dazzled us with prisms and lasers. These memories are a far cry from what is actually taught in school these days. Even AP classes – which are meant to be for top students – allow little room for creativity. Science labs are written up by the CollegeBoard years in advance. Where's the thrill of discovery in conducting a lab that millions of other students have conducted before? Last year, I conducted dozens of labs in my AP Chemistry class. Whenever a lab went wrong, my teacher said, "Don't worry; that lab probably won't be on the test." That flies directly in the face of what experiments should be all about. Especially in science, failure is the best way to learn! It's an opportunity to see what went wrong, and fix it next time. Instead, teachers are urged to dismiss failure because they need to stick to the CollegeBoard-approved guidelines. It's no wonder that students are losing interest and dropping out.

    How can we fix this apathy in students? The answer is to start young. I dedicate many hours each week to tutoring both disadvantaged kids and my high school peers, and I've learned that almost always, a little push is all that's needed. I've conducted chemistry demonstrations at the local elementary school, and after the demonstrations kids always crowd around me and ask how something happened. They go home telling their parents how cool something was and they go to class with so much more enthusiasm. Seeing the spark in their eyes – the same spark for learning that has fueled me through my school years – is why I do this. But no matter how many hours I spend with these kids, I'm only one person. If real change is to be created, we need to start on a classroom scale.

    Forget about standardized tests in elementary school; students get plenty of that in middle and high school. Instead, focus on hands-on learning, and let kids take some control of their own learning. Let them choose books to read themselves. Give them some mind-twisting math problems, and let them try to solve them. Let them conduct simple science experiments themselves. Give kids as much freedom as possible for independent learning, while making sure that they still learn the basics of what they need to know. As they get older, start to give them more and more guidance, but never be so restrictive that they lose their passion for learning. Teach lessons that are designed to get students thinking, not designed to make them think uniformly to do well on a test. Have students learn for the sake of learning.

    In the end, it's not about fundamentally changing the structure of K-12 education in America. I'm a realist. It's about making simple changes to classes at the lower levels, when kids haven't lost their childhood sense of wonder yet. Get them to love learning at an early age, and who knows how far they'll go?

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