Guest Blog By Gigi from Kentucky:

When I was in grade school, they implemented a program called “individual progression”.  This would be inquiry-based learning today.  The theory was that students would flourish and excel in learning by removing “roadblocks” of formal instruction and testing.  Sounds great, right?  The opposite occurred.  We weren’t given instruction on how to learn or study.  As a child, I didn’t know any better.  What I did know is that there were minimal expectations, formal education, and very little instruction by the teachers.  The teachers were more like a babysitter than a teacher.  That was fine by me.  I didn’t really know how I was doing or if I was on the right track.  My classmates didn’t know either.  We were just going along and having fun.  No expectations.  My parents were given subjective report cards but no real metrics to let them know I was falling behind.  

My entrance exam scores for the Catholic HS were well below the students that were educated in a traditional school.  They were so bad that my parents discussed sending me to the public HS because they were afraid that I might fail. (I overheard this discussion and was crushed.)  I had 10 brother and sisters ahead of me that didn’t fail.  How humiliating and demoralizing.  I thought my grade school was preparing me like my siblings.  I knew I wasn’t stupid but why wasn’t I ready?  

Luckily my parents took a chance and sent me to the Catholic HS.  With traditional instructions, I learned and worked hard.  Tests helped me know I was on the right track.  I was so afraid of failing that it wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year that someone mentioned I was at the top of my class.  I was shocked.  The sad thing was that I wasn’t at the top of my class because I was excited about learning and achieving success.  It was because I was so afraid of failure – who wants to learn this way?  When I learned that success could be achieved with traditional education, feedback and hard work, it changed my whole outlook.  No longer a failure but a student that could achieve anything with the right direction and help.  Lucky for me, my parents believed in me and traditional education.  I would hate for any child to experience the sense of failure I felt when there are great teachers wanting to help children learn traditionally.  My grade-school class were test subjects, and the program was a failure.  Let teachers teach, and children will flourish.