I’m attaching a lesson plan I wrote for a student teacher to think about. It’s a procedure I used with high school science students. This is my response to the paradox of trying to prepare students for standardized tests in ways that are consistent with what we know about how students learn.

Please click here to see the lesson.

I had occasion to overhear a conversation among some college students. Some sorority girl types were chatting before class. Said one, “I was walking down the hall and Ashley smiled at me. I didn’t smile back. I don’t like her.”

My own daughter, now age 23, told me similar stories of people ignoring her in high school when she said hi to them. I didn’t necessarily believe her. Surely there is some tiny bit of civility among young people. And these are college kids, not teenagers.

It seems to me the issue is not seeing value in those who are not like you, and I would venture to guess, being fearful of those who don’t follow social norms. I don’t know what Ashley did to incur such petty rudeness. I don’t think anyone deserves to be treated that way. In the long run, the sorority girls lose out, since they don’t get to meet a lot of people who might enrich their narrow experience.

All of us lose out though. We have groups of people in America who see no reason to interact with those who are different. It leads to the kind of polarization we see in our politics. The sorority girls become soccer moms, send their kids to private school so they don’t have to mix with those people, and vote no on public transportation, because they would never put themselves in a subway car with those people.

The important thing the sorority girls are telling us is that they have very poor social skills, and little interest in acquiring them. Imagine being a gawky nerd in a high school dominated by these creatures. We wonder why angry young men barely holding it together mentally might take a Bushmaster and start shooting at those who torture them, or even worse, murder the innocent first graders who who represent hope for the future.

We could be working with young people in schools so they develop trust, tolerance of difference, and the ability to communicate across ethnic and social divides. But no, the mania for testing and accountability has led us to ruthlessly sort out the winners from the losers, and discard those who don’t reach academic or social targets. They become test scores rather than human beings.

The problem with treating people as objects is that it damages them. It is not any way to create a society we want to live in.

Not for education. At least not for education in reading, thinking, problem solving and reading the world with numbers. As far as I can see, school is for learning to stand in line, coping with incredible boredom, competing with others, sitting still, dealing with being the best or not being the best, and developing subterfuges for avoiding or attracting the attention of authority figures.

As I visit classrooms, I see that much less than half, much less than a quarter, of the “instructional” time involves engagement with ideas. Enormous effort is expended in coercing students to sit silently in desks. Students are not allowed to go to the bathroom by themselves—the teacher must take the entire class at a scheduled time, stand in the hall monitoring and enforcing silence, which students quickly become adept at resisting. This procedure takes 15-20 minutes, and makes the teacher not a professional educator but a babysitter. Then the entire class must walk back into the classroom, settle back down, and resume whatever rote task they were engaged in.

Announcements, very loud announcements, regularly interrupt instruction. I watch teacher after teacher stand silent for 2-3 minutes while the office makes some announcement about bus schedules, or asks for so-and-so (student) to please come  to the office for some reason or other. I’ve rarely spent a half hour in a classroom that was not interrupted, usually two or three times.

There is no recess, students are not allowed unstructured time to work out social relationships or develop social skills, or develop the sense of self-efficacy that comes with them. There is very little physical education as we concentrate on basics.

So what are students learning? On the plus side, there’s nothing wrong with developing self-control. On the minus side, to be monitored, to quietly resist authority, to deal with boredom. Most students learn that a few kids are very smart but they are not. This smartness remains mysterious to those who are not.  Is it surprising that kids are alienated, smoke pot, drink themselves into a stupor during high school, play video games endlessly and…take assault weapons to school and shoot the place up?

“Experimental” schools consistently demonstrate that children and youth can do so very much. These schools can no longer be called experiments—we know they foster engaged, literate and energized citizenry. I am left with the conclusion that the condition of education is intentional.

Thinking about the murders in CT. Watching the news–interview with a psychologist, who talked about how "these guys" are always isolated, and blame others for their troubles. Also I note that the kindergarten-teacher mother was really into the gun collecting and shooting. I see a connection, not the obvious one. Troubled people have always been with us. But now troubled people live in a gun culture, where they are easily available and just a normal part of life. 300 million guns in America have not made us safer.

It’s easy to demonize the perpetrator. That’s exactly what he did: demonize us.

Why do we think it’s normal that a kindergarten teacher would be a weapons aficionado? Personally I think there’s something dark here. And I’m not blaming anyone. It’s just very odd.

Years ago when I was in graduate school, I dated a fellow from East Africa. He had been born in a small village high on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and had somehow found his way to a PhD program at UCLA. He told me the story of how he had walked in to a Wild Western-theme bar in Westwood, where they had cutesy signs, “Check your weapons at the bar.” He told me how terrified he had been that people might be walking around Westwood with handguns, and ran out. Raised in the wilds of Africa, he found such an idea unspeakably uncivilized. This was in the 1970’s and probably most of were not carrying handguns in our purses. It wasn’t socially acceptable yet.

Who is responsible for this fierce aggressiveness that is all about us?