Haygood Learning

 

A place for learning about different ways of learning!

“It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”

~Eleanor Roosevelt

We’ve lied to ourselves so long about age being the determining factor for access to knowledge that we forgot how we got to this point. The idea behind our current age-segregated education system originated in the mid-1800s. Industrial Age educators assumed that separating children by age would be the most efficient way to dole out knowledge.

Education became an assembly line, with our children the product. Year by year, step by step, piece by piece, we put them together. We add in eyes and painted smiles and we dress them in graduation gowns and caps. We send them out into the world in a box of our own making. From behind the plastic window, they help us assemble their own children. “This is the way it’s done.”

The goal of this website is to disrupt the assembly line. Many educators and parents appreciate the fact that all children grow and develop at different rates. Some children have a more pronounced disparity between their cognitive, social-emotional, and/or physical abilities than others. This disparity is called asynchrony. When a student’s cognitive abilities are well below the mean for children their age, schools provide scaffolding, supports, modifications, and interventions. When a student’s cognitive abilities are well above the mean for children of the same age, most schools are left to do their best with insufficient funding, resources, and training.

At a certain point, students on either end of the normative curve require more severe interventions than an Industrial Age classroom is equipped to provide. If we embrace the truth of asynchrony, we have to do away with limiting children based on their age and make a shift toward mastery as the determining factor for promotion.

The ideas, strategies, and resources that you’ll find here support the central idea that all students deserve to learn at a speed and level that matches their abilities.

Haygood Learning

Let them learn.

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