Wonder is Worth It!

I have had the good fortune to come upon the poem below on the blog of Juliet Bonnay.  I have not met Juliet, but we have some common understandings about the way traditional schools are limiting the future of today’s children.  There is such rhetoric on innovation and entrepreneurship, but the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM) has created such a thirst for measurement that we remain cautious and safe with the things we can measure in a prescribed amount of time and we continue to create “square people who are brown inside.”  I share with you the following excerpt from her website:

He always wanted to say things but no one understood.
He always wanted to explain things but to no one cared.
So he drew.

Sometimes he would just draw and it wasn’t any thing.
He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky and it would
be only the sky and things inside him that needed saying.

And it was after that he drew the picture,
It was a beautiful picture. He kept it under his pillow and would
let no one see it.
And he would look at it every night and think about it.
And when it was dark and his eyes were closed, he could see it still.
And it was all of him and he loved it.

When he started school he brought it with him,
Not to show anyone, but just to have with him like a friend.

It was funny about school.
He sat in a square brown room, like all the other rooms,
And it was tight and close, and stiff.

He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, with his arm stiff and
his feet flat on the floor, stiff, with the teacher watching
and watching.

The teacher came and spoke to him.
She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys,
he said he didn’t like them and she said it didn’t matter.
After that he drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way
he felt about the morning. And it was beautiful.

The teacher came and smiled at him. “What’s this?” she said.
“Why don’t you draw something like Ken’s drawing?
Isn’t it beautiful?”

After that his mother bought him a tie and he always drew
airplanes and rocket-ships like everyone else.
And he threw the old picture away.
And when he lay all alone looking at the sky, it was big and blue,
and all of everything, but he wasn’t anymore.

He was square and brown inside and his hands were stiff.
And he was like everyone else. All the things inside him that
needed saying didn’t need it anymore.

It had stopped pushing. It was crushed.
Stiff.
Like everything else.

-Anonymous

Measurement is important, data helps us explain success, how do we do  all of that in the context of innovation and entrepreneurial thinking?  If we can answer this question we will truly develop assessment and evaluation systems that encourage innovation and entrepreneurship.

There’s a fine line between educational development and making something really stupid out of research results–

http://www.youtube.com/v/BpmQZ5MXs8c?fs=1&hl=en_US

Could this happen here?