TEST Education vs. BEST Education: Let's Save Our Children from a Bad Idea

With vaccines becoming available for COVID-19, parents will eventually feel confident they can safely send their children back to school. But then what? To what kind of education will they return? Will what teachers and students do be any different than before? Now is the time to seriously question what has become the de facto purpose of education, preparing children to take tests.   

Misguided and ever-shifting policies continue to bind the hands of dedicated and talented teachers. It doesn't matter whether it's in-person learning or distance learning. Teachers are too often reduced to being assembly-line inspectors in what amount to test-taking factories, where current state standards are spot-welded to students' brains.     

Focusing on elementary education, Test Education vs. Best Education explains how our children's potential for learning is often sacrificed in favor of boosting test scores. Children deserve so much more. They deserve an education that not only gives them knowledge and skills, but sparks their imagination and provides positive mental models for thinking about themselves, Spaceship Earth, and Earth's other passengers.   

The author proposes an ambitious, non-profit project that will result in a new and higher standard of education for elementary school children in the United States. It is the goal of the project to ensure that classroom teachers create the best learning environments possible for children and curtail the testing insanity promoted by education bureaucrats and the testing-industrial complex that profits from it.   

We all have a stake in the future of American education. Once you read Test Education vs. Best Education, you will never again settle for anything less than the best in education for our children.