Passion and talent are necessary precursors to competency and skill-set development. Passion is the fuel and driver for success in any field. G-d-given by definition, talent speaks for itself. At the same time, skill sets cannot be built if the student’s passions are not assessed, stimulated, and trained up.
Competency-based learning has a deservedly rich history. Noted scholars have contributed to and enhanced this field (Dubois & Rothwell, Shandler, Spencer, and many others).
In the US, year after year, there are some million children dropping out of high school.1 Although the percentage of dropouts has been improving steadily since the 1960s,2 Blacks drop out at a higher rate than Whites. Despite huge gains in graduating numbers made by Latinos,3 this group drops out at more than twice the rate of Whites. Forty percent of inner-city students do not graduate on time, if at all. This is a national tragedy with huge cost factors, financially and spiritually, across myriad dimensions of our culture. (A high school dropout can expect to earn $200,000 less than a high school graduate over his or her lifetime, and almost a million dollars less than a college graduate.4) And we can pay for this tragic failure in perpetuity via social-service expenditures, and even jail time. As Robert Gordon writes about “The Great Stagnation of American Education,”5 since 1990, educational attainment has slowed to a crawl. It’s time to innovate!
Inner-city students are often multi-talented: they excel in art, music, dance, sport, and other activities. They have energy, imagination, and they are plain bored. They frequently act out as a function of depression, and an unrequited need for stimulation. The boredom factor cannot be underestimated in their environment. Many are latent freedom riders/writers waiting to be developed. Too many, however, engage in criminal activity, and often become cradle-to-prison statistics.
Readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, are marginally relevant for these students, at least for the moment. Over 40% of all public school students are in special-education programs. Many are learning-disabled and cognitively impaired.
We must meet these young people where they are, stimulate their passions and expand their talents. In turn, their learning issues often remit, and their cognitive functioning can even improve, in concert with their deepening commitment to skillset development and amplification. The force and power of passion and talent should never be underestimated.
If a kid is a master graffiti artist, capture him and throw him in a room with graphic arts instructors and the latest and greatest Apple products. Train him up! Help him gain mastery of his talent, fueled by his passion. Later, after genuine, earned self-esteem is achieved, he can start to focus more vigilantly on reading, writing, and balancing a checkbook. First things first: harness the passion, reinforce the talent. Grow the person from the inside out.
If a kid is a master auto thief, capture him and throw him in a room with security and electronics experts with state-of-the-art equipment. Train him up. Make him an expert in the field. Grow his self-esteem and ego based on achievement and production within standardized job norms.
Corporate America needs to be enlisted in this process. There are oceans of passion and talent waiting to be harvested in America’s inner cities. Innovation is potentially limitless. The inner city is an natural arena for corporate initiatives waiting to be mined.
The basic academic skills have a better chance of being taught and mastered after real life/real job skill sets are developed. Showing up is a big part of success. You have to be there to play/work there. And theory maintains that mastery, self-esteem, and pride in performance will generalize and reinforce gain across traditional academic skill tracks after these students get into a groove.
As a culture, we project our norms, values, expectations, head-sets, and beliefs onto kids/potential learners/ students. We create curricula with little relevance to many students. Not all students can become Renaissance people, nor should they. Different strengths in brain functioning require different educational technologies. The core is within the learner; forcing a core onto students frequently creates resistance, avoidance, angst, pain. We all know the drill.
Two models are especially relevant to PTBL: the Waldorf education model, pioneered in 1919 by Rudolph Steiner, an Austrian philosopher; and the University of Miami football recruiting model, created by Howard Schnellenberger in 1979. These seemingly disparate models share certain commonalities relevant to PTBL.
Waldorf Education is the largest independent alternative education movement in the world. It is a humanistic approach, stressing the role of imagination in the learning process, as well as the value of integrating academic, artistic, and practical activities. The goal is to develop socially competent people with free, morally responsible, integrated personalities. The students’ capacity for imagination and their inherent talents are the subject of the educational process. The educational assessment process is primarily qualitative, not quantitative.
When Howard Schnellenberger took over as Head Coach at the University of Miami, he announced his intention to win a national championship within five years, and he initiated a recruiting strategy aimed at finding and retaining the best local talent. He spoke of mining the State of Miami. There was an abundance of talent in Miami’s inner-city pockets. The rest is history. The U of M’s football program and those of the other majors in the state (FSU and University of Florida) have been legendary.
The essential point is that Steiner and Schnellenberger had the foresight and vision to understand that imagination and talent were supreme drivers of skill-set development and achievement. These two educators approached students in a unique manner. And they awakened and harnessed passion, enabling talent to thrive.
My model is a grassroots and expansive one. We are on the brink of a disaster affecting a huge segment of our people because of a lack of educational success. We will pay in one way or another. My model speaks to a critical issue in our culture: sustainability. It’s time to brainstorm like never have before, and break down the rigid structures that sustain failure and promote methods not meeting many students where they truly are: struggling simply to survive, often in multi-challenging circumstances at home, in school, and in their neighborhood. Each and every student represents a microcosm of our culture’s success going forward.
1https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16
2https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_219.70.asp
3https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-high-school-dropout-rates
4Ibid.
5The New York Times, September 7 2013.