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You can't make someone taller, but you can certainly make them shorter. Diseases or lack of the nutrition can destroy kids' height potential.

So the role of school is to make sure that the kids have everything they need to reach their potential.

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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"

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