What prompted legislators to standardize education? Was it an attempt to help teachers? Raise expectations? Fix something? Before the internet, it probably made more sense. In that world, everyone would need a larger base of knowledge since you couldn’t just google any question.

Remember “You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket?” Things changed fast and it is unfortunate that we were busy standardizing and locking that outdated thinking into place.

Well, that ship has sailed. It turns out that we can go along with our students’ energy and ideas. We don’t need strict conformity or identical learning paths. The long lists of standards that we slog through are more like chains than highways.

Maybe the specifics of what we learn do not matter as much as our attitude about learning, our skills at learning, and how teachable or open we are as learners.