I recently completed reading a book by Thom and Joani Schultz entitled ”Why Nobody Learns Much of Anything at Church: And How to Fix It” One section talks about Lost Goals in the Schools. America’s schools provide an example of forgotten goals. The schools have become preoccupied with uniformity, standardized tests, fill-in-the-blanks, and a factory approach to education. They’ve forgotten the real goal of education-to help prepare kids for the real world and inspire them to become life-long learners. Tracy Kidder, journalist, says this: “The problem is fundamental. Put 20 or more children of roughly the same age in a little room, confine them to desks, make them behave.  It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to do, declared that all of them should do it.”

In an effort to “get back to basics,” some schools have bulldozed right over the true basics. Are the kids graduating with the skills and experience that will adequately enhance their lives in our rapidly changing world?  Or are they leaving school simply knowing how to cram for a test?

Schools today have an antiquated school regime built around the farm calendar-summers off for work in the fields. I grew up in farming country.  My wife is still a farm girl at heart.  But too many teachers don’t understand the most basic law of the farm.  The harvest is what really matters. And the harvest won’t come unless the farmer believes in and tends to the process-preparing the soil, planting, fertilizing, weeding, and then harvesting. It takes time and care.  The farmer knows that cramming won’t work.  If he or she pays no attention to the process, but tries to cram and plant a week before the harvest, it’ll be a mighty slim winter.

George Wood sums it up in his book Schools That Work:  “For decades Americans believed that bigger equals better, that coverage equals knowledge, that schools should work like factories, both administratively and pedagogically.  We have accepted virtually without question the way schools currently look and operate. It’s as if schools in their structure and form but not their output are sacred and beyond question.”

Many, if not most, schools have lost sight of the goal.  They’ve forgotten that the harvest is the only goal that really matters.  They’ve been lulled into believing that driving old tractors to and fro is the goal of the farm. They’ve taken their eye off the harvest.

Yet the school system has taught kids that cramming works. All that counts is that grade on the exam.  Stuff your head with short-term facts and figures, learn how to select best-guess answers on a multiple-choice exam, outsmart the system, and settle for a grade rather than an education. I AM Academy, of course, is concerned with student academic growth, but more importantly is your child’s spiritual growth.  It is far more important for my daughter to make it to Heaven with a 3.0 gpa than go to Hell with a 4.0 because of the pressure I or she put on her to obtain that “A”.  If she spends more time and effort in “getting that grade” than drawing closer to God, then that grade could become the thing she worships most.  If I give her more praise for “straight A’s” than for Christ-like character, then I inform her which is more important in my eyes.  (Of course, going to Heaven with a 4.0 gpa would be wonderful!)

We at I AM Academy count it a privilege that you and God have entrusted your child with us for their academic and spiritual education.  We promise to do everything we can, through the leading of God’s Holy Spirit, to live up to that trust we have been given.  Thank you for the opportunity!

Dr. Michael N. Myers
Superintendent of Learning