Teaching Kids to Be Tall

That's the sort of well-meaning intention that's backfired because we don't really know how to measure learning unlike height. And yet we've used these proxies to determine so many learning interventions. Take phonics. Sure, that's the right scaffolding pretty much like balance bikes are better than training wheels. But we leach out all meaning by doing narrow drills becaause we are too myopically focused on the "are they reading" goal, which is further broken down into reductive sub-goals "are they blending" "are they decoding" and so on. But learning is multi-dimensional. We learn to find meaning and meaning comes from connected the world to things we see, hear, touch, feel, and finally invent.

Think about how you might want to "measure potential" and ensure "they have everything"

Yes, the whole language method does not provide enough scaffolding. But phonics alone without the context of the joy, utility, meaning of reading or too much driling is essentially so much scaffolding that it blinds you to the big picture. What we know about how the brain learns tells us it is a dance between the whole and the parts, the portrait and the particulars. This is pretty much lost in our reductive approach to learning, which in turn builds on a reductive approach to science, which worked quite well for us until we encountered complex interconnected systems that need systems thinking. Worth watching! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRQY01Hhrww&t=201s