Yesterday as we were driving our seven-year old daughter home from her gymnastics class she ominously announced that she wasn’t going back to school.

“It’s so boring, daddy,” she said, and then proceeded to sing the word “boring” about 157 times to make sure we got the point. Now we know Tess is pretty smart, and we know that she’s not being challenged by some of the curriculum which she learned a year ago at home. But we wondered if there was more to it.

“We do the same stuff every day,” she said as she poked holes in the paper mache turtle she’d made in class. “Everybody does the same stuff.” Our mind caught a picture of 18 cloned paper mache turtles drying on the window sill in her classroom.

And there it was. “Everybody” is doing the same stuff in second grade, no matter if some of them know that stuff already, or some of them learn that stuff differently, or some of them relate to that stuff in unique ways, or some of them just aren’t interested that stuff. Now mind you, Tess just came off of a week of standardized testing, which makes our stomach churn just to write it. So she might be having some reaction to the forced demonstration of skills that our current system deems essential for a sound education. But we’re sure most of her feelings stem from having to do what everyone else does on a daily basis.

Last night, we thought more about Tess’s turtle. She had created it, but she hadn’t been allowed to create it creatively. Sure, she added the paint and the construction paper feet and tail, but we doubt she’d even been given the opportunity to do something different, to learn the skills in her own way, to create something that she wouldn’t poke holes in later. And we’re sure there hadn’t been a thought about publishing whatever she created, of sharing it with other people.

The bigger sense here, for us at least, is the frustration that we continue to do what we’ve done for the last 100 years, deliver the curriculum we’ve been handed, the one that was written long before her teacher even met Tess. The one developed not to turn Tess into a lifelong learner but to insure that she passes the test. The one that says that her interests take a back seat to the interests of the state. We’re not saying there aren’t skills she needs to learn, but to be honest, we want her to have a passion for learning first.

We keep thinking back to hearing Seymour Pappert at CoSn last month. He said he was working on a math curriculum where kids learned the concepts in the context of, get this, building a house. How cool is that? We mean, shouldn’t every school have a farm, a garden, a compost bin? We know, we know…it’s unrealistic. But what’s also unrealistic is to think that these kids are going to reach their potential when they are all expected to end up pretty much the same.

We’re struggling with all of this, with our responsibility as a parent to figure out what we can do to make sure Tess learns to love learning, with our angst as an educator who sees a system with islands of success in seas of mediocrity, and as a technologist who believes in the transformative potential of the tools that we’re immersed in. Our hope is that as the current system continues to falter new opportunities to effect change will arise.