What I Hope to Accomplish on the FNSBSD Board of Education

What I would like to accomplish on the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District Board of Education:

Put Teachers First:
Teachers need to be free to inspire students to want to study and learn. To the extent teachers are hindered by policy and administration, they cannot inspire students to love learning. Current blanket policies and regulation force teachers, children and the district to conform to a distant, disinterested third party.

Give Parents Control of the School:
We need to decentralize power in the school district and give the schools back to the local communities. Lift borders and restrictions and allow parents and students to choose their school and their classrooms. The district currently spends almost $16,000 per student. Give that funding to each student and let it go to the schools and classrooms that attract those students.

Freedom Education:
The current school system produces obedient, compliant, security minded students who graduate looking for jobs and, increasingly, the jobs are not there. Without jobs, after twelve years of being told WHAT to think, they naturally turn to experts for handouts. On the other hand, individualized Leadership education produces leaders, thinkers, entrepreneurs, inventors, artists and statesmen who know HOW to think and will produce their own jobs.

Classics:
The problems we face today are different than anyone has encountered before, but the process of problem-solving is not. Students need individualized, mentored education, rooted in a deep understanding of history and the classics. Classics produce free individuals who can apply true principles in every situation.

Individualized Education:
Look into the eyes of a child and see if you don't believe that he or she was born to make a difference in the world. Students have a purpose, an individual mission in life for which they need to prepare. They need to be free to study, learn and excel according to their individual genius, with guidance from a mentor. The teachers, free to be mentors, inspire students to establish and execute individual educational goals.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The 7 Keys of Great Teaching*

1.) Classics (Not Textbooks)
2.) Mentors (Not Professors)
3.) Inspire (Not Require)
4.) Structure Time (Not Content)
5.) Quality (Not Conformity)
6.) Simplicity (Not Complexity)
7.) You (Not Them)

More to come...

*found in "A Thomas Jefferson Education" by Oliver DeMille

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