Lynn Stoddard, my friend and fellow participant in the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO), shared with me the text of a guest commentary, “Educating Everybody”, he wrote for the Ogden, Utah Standard-Examiner. Lynn is a now retired long-time teacher and founder of the Educating for Human Greatness Alliance. His commentary lays out clearly the vision of holistic education that has its roots in John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner and others. He is a great champion for a vision embraced by many alternative educators, and an approach to teaching that I acknowledge and respect. But with my emerging left-libertarian orientation to education, it is a vision that I have developed some issues with.

He sets the context in his opening paragraph…

The time has come to change the way we educate children in our public schools. There are signs that a vast majority of students are not even coming close to achieving their potential. A 27 percent national dropout rate may be but the tip of an iceberg of students whose potential for success are not being met. Many students never get an A or a B on a report card. Most students are educated at a low, C or D level of understanding. This is disastrous for those who drop out of school and too often enter the prison population. It is equally tragic for those who stay in school to acquire knowledge at a low level. Even those who get high grades may be deficient in understanding the real life application of subject matter content. They often aim for high grades rather than genuine learning and soon forget the material after the tests are given. The sad fact is that we do not have a public education system that aims to help all students master the knowledge they will need to fulfill their lives.

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