{"id":1747,"date":"2014-06-11T16:40:45","date_gmt":"2014-06-11T16:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/?p=1747"},"modified":"2014-06-11T16:40:45","modified_gmt":"2014-06-11T16:40:45","slug":"is-learning-the-primary-goal-of-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/is-learning-the-primary-goal-of-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Learning the Primary Goal of Schools?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\" standalone=\"no\"?--><\/p>\n<div>Earlier this week I officially started my doctorate at the University of Hawaii. \u00a0My parents being\u00a0<i>oh so proud,\u00a0<\/i>keep telling me how they run into my former teachers and love telling them that I am working on a doctorate of education. \u00a0I think they really enjoy the shock value.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Truthfully, my former teachers have good reason to be a little shocked because let\u2019s just say I wasn\u2019t a very good student growing up. \u00a0It\u2019s not that I didn\u2019t want to do good, at least when I was really young. \u00a0It was just that I seemed to have a hard time following instructions, submitting homework, and doing what the teacher wanted.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>However, when I think back to my childhood I remember being an constantly curious kid who was always tinkering with this or that and would often walk my own path. \u00a0In fact although I didn\u2019t always do too well in school, I feel that I was alway hungry to learn something new and interesting.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>This got me thinking the other day, is learning the primary goal of schools? \u00a0You\u2019d think so right, but the more I think about it, the more I\u2019m less sure their systems are designed to be flexible learning-centered places of learning (does that sound redundant). \u00a0For example, on any given day a student \u00a0comes to school usually at a time when their brains aren\u2019t fully awake, to take classes that are only roughly designed around their individual ability, in core courses (math, language arts, social studies, science) that have remained the more or less the same subject area for over a hundred years, and pep rallies, etc.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Of course, there is some learning happening, but there also seems to be a lot of other. \u00a0Maybe this is ok, after all communities come together to support schools and their other activities. \u00a0Still it seems that some of the learning focused school change initiatives that us educators talk about is unlikely to be implemented in a world of so many other distractions away from learning.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I\u2019d be curious to see the data of an average student to see how much time they spend engaged and learning in an average day. \u00a0That might answer my question, but in the meantime what do you think is learning the primary goal of schools?<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this week I officially started my doctorate at the University of Hawaii. \u00a0My parents being\u00a0oh so proud,\u00a0keep telling me how they run into my former teachers and love telling them that I am working on a doctorate of education. \u00a0I think they really enjoy the shock value. Truthfully, my former teachers have good reason [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[78,158,208],"class_list":["post-1747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-distracted-learners","tag-learning","tag-school-purpose"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/grads.jpg?fit=900%2C220","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5BJbv-sb","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}