It’s not just No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top that has failed our adolescents—it’s every single thing we have tried.

~Laurence Steinberg

Gist of yet another screaming “American educational system disaster story” is that we need to get a lot better at “non cognitive” parts of achievement.

(Columns like this are not exactly the answer in a few paragraphs, and are intended to be provocative with extreme opinions and one narrow  POV  set of “facts”, and it can be counterproductive not to understand “there’s more to it” than one sided perspectives…..but they bring up various memes that can be useful to ponder.)

The meme in this one is that we don’t address the whole person adequately in HS, and thus we don’t address those aspects that get in the way of learning, such as being bored, and the “soft skills” that allow students to achieve.

Which is similar to a central PSA view: learning is a holistic endeavor of the whole being, and all the contributing aspects of achievement thus need to be addressed. Which is reflected in how a Social Learning Construct (SLC) is designed, among other aspects of a DLE.