Student Success > Learning How to Learn

Learning How to Learn

Training our kids to become life-long learners, not test-takers, needs to be the goal of education.

According to the World Bank Group, Lifelong learning is crucial to preparing workers to compete in the global economy. But it is important for other reasons as well. By improving people's ability to function as members of their communities, education and training increase social cohesion, reduce crime, and improve income distribution.

This is evidenced as some the nation’s leading universities are offering distance learning, and other nontraditional academic tracks for lifelong learners. Stanford, Princeton, Yale and Oxford, among many other leading higher education institutions, are providing these opportunities as the global economy becomes more complex, demanding a workforce that can adapt to new technologies and ever-changing cultural and social conditions. The bottom-line: the economic success of our country depends on people who know how to learn…not how to take tests.

This economic reality is just one reason why a charter school education is far more conducive to training students for lifelong success. While the traditional public education system is responding to a political demand for higher test scores, and is essentially training our kids how not to succeed within the real-world complexities of global competition, the flexibility and focus on individual learning within the charter school paradigm gives our kids a fighting chance.

Teaching our kids to be lifelong learners prepares our children to:

• Develop the attitude and skills to adapt and learn in a world of speed, change and complexity.
• Be more creative and rational when faced with problem-solving situations.
• Adapt more easily into higher education, and especially post-graduate higher learning environments.
• Achieve greater levels of personal fulfillment and economic success.

In becoming lifelong learners, children develop the ability to be independent, productive thinkers. While their public school system peers are being trained to think in a purely linear fashion (i.e. learn what’s necessary to pass a test), the charter school kids have the opportunity to develop a much more three-dimensional approach to problem-solving, which is most certainly what is sorely in demand in all arenas of today’s workplace.

To prove this point, think about some of the greatest achievers in the American tradition: Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Abraham Lincoln…all were self-learners. What would our nation look like had Einstein been bent into the mold of standardized education? On a less known level, in his book, The Millionaire Mind, Thomas Stanley chronicles that a good percentage of America’s self-made millionaires did not fare well in public education, many of whom were told by guidance counselors that they really wouldn’t amount to much. Given this environment, these men and women had a choice: settle for what the establishment expected of them, or become lifelong learners and create successful, fulfilling lives. They chose the latter…and our society is far better off because they did.

Ultimately, the child who becomes a lifelong learner has more of a chance to grow into a productive, self-realized adult who will make a positive contribution to his or her culture and to society. Given this, doesn’t it make sense that we invest in this type of education, rather than molding our kids into test-takers?

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