Should we try to fill the liter bottle? Or should we try to find ways to hold more?

Bird Droppings October. 20, 2026
Should we try to fill the liter bottle? Or should we try to find ways to hold more?

It’s been a few years since I taught reading to a group of teenagers down in Warner Robins. Our school had just started using a new reading program. In my class of thirteen students, twelve were boys, and one was a girl. The reading program fit their reading levels, second through maybe fourth grade. In their words, “it was for kids”. It was sort of like the old Dick and Jame readers of my day. I had a very brief understanding of the John Dewey-oriented Foxfire Approach to Teaching and recalled some of the tenets. Democratic classroom student input and suggestions. I asked, “What do you want to read? Wrestling magazines were number one, car magazines were number two, and then Tenn came up from my female student, and out of the blue, Popular Mechanics. I went shopping that evening and found some of each. We started by reading and looking at pictures, then they asked me for help reading, and soon they were writing down words they weren’t sure about. Each day we progressed; soon they helped each other read and figure words out. The school year ended, and kids were tested in reading; all of them had improved by at least two grade levels. My principal was so excited she said she would order the next level of the reading program.

I never had the heart to tell her how it really happened. The following semester, I went to work for my father’s company. I sometimes wonder what happened when those students were handed the next level of a program, they had never really been using. I came away feeling that I did impact these students, and they didn’t suddenly acquire larger bottles. They discovered that they had something worth filling them with and a reason to learn.

Every year, in education, we see a new trend, basically like trying to pour five gallons of material into a liter bottle with a funnel. As you try, obviously, a large portion of material spills out and is discarded or lost. I use a liter bottle as my analogy’s container because a liter is the standard international metric unit of volume, a universal standard. This symbolism appears to be what is happening in education: an attempt to find that liter bottle in terms of a student’s capabilities, a universal student standard. Lately, most researchers have had little luck with standards and universal methodology.

In many current public-school settings, teachers have been stripped of their individuality and creativity, often coerced into teaching specifically to the standardized test to ensure their students pass or face consequences. In an effort to meet federal and state mandates, curriculum and lesson guidelines are in place in many school settings that are creating a more uniform and categorized boxed package of material that students learn and retain, and through this we are losing aspects of children’s identities and individuality as well as the teacher’s creativity, imagination, and individuality. Much of this is market-driven, with publishing companies helping develop tests, research those same tests, and create accompanying materials to teach to tests, along with textbooks aligned with them. My concern is what we are leaving behind in this rush and push for test results and standardization as we fill that student, that liter bottle. Usually, the first thing to go is creativity, often in the form of art and music.

As I began writing, I realized the idea of soul, which, for me, is a crucial part of our individuality, is being stripped from children, literally, through an increasingly organized, orchestrated emphasis on testing. Most people will first attribute a religious connotation to the idea of soul. I began reviewing ideas and research from various authors who used the concept of soul as the heart of our individuality, which gave me a comfortable point of reference. I went looking back historically, trying to find where the emphasis directed toward improving our scores in standardized tests began, and it was during the period of the Cold War, when our attention was turned to beating the Russians, that the federal government officially started taking a hand in legislating and pushing for standardized test scores.

The Vietnam War and the social awareness of the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies created a bump in the road for standardized testing and the legislated learning processes, however briefly. For a short period of time, individuality was the norm again. Unfortunately, this backlash lasted only briefly, partly because advances in scientific technology promoted and pushed standardized testing; the days of independence were short-lived. Today’s students and parents are taking up the gauntlet again. The activism of the late sixties and early seventies was short-lived as pressure for standardization ensued, and innovative teaching became obsolete in many schools. Government, state, and federal authorities were taking over education, and innovation, individuality, and the progressivism of John Dewey, a major proponent of individuality in education, were being pushed aside.

The individual’s experience and involvement in society were central to Dewey’s thought and to the educational premises of progressivism. It was trying to tie these experiences to education, giving context to the content that Dewey promoted. Dewey was adamant about society and democratic interaction in his educational pursuits. Dewey foresaw the direction our industrial society was headed as legislated, packaged learning began stripping away individuality for the corporate good and, currently, large profits. Society’s goal of preparing needed workers and consumers came at a cost: losing part of them as they fell prey to standardized demands.

Sadly, alternatives exist; in a community, strength lies in interactions, relationships, and implications. Within schools, this can be a powerful tool. This could apply in a learning setting, drawing on Foxfire Core Practice Three.

“The work teachers and students do together enable learners to make connections between the classroom work, the surrounding communities, and the world beyond their communities.” Foxfire Core Practices, 2009

Real education is about learning through and of experience. It is learning by doing. It is an environment where each person contributes and interacts. This is a democratic classroom, and this was developed in the early 1900’s by Dewey, and this philosophy is still considered progressive as legislation is pushed for standardization and simplicity in measuring using tests. There is a paradox in this type of education versus the standardized regime that is being imposed through NCLB and other legislated efforts.

“As nobody can become aware of his individuality unless he is closely and responsibly related to his fellow beings, he is not withdrawing to an egoistic desert when he tries to find himself. He can only discover himself when he is deeply and unconditionally related to some, and generally related to a great many, with whom he has a chance to compare, and from whom he is able to discriminate himself. “ William Pinar

We, as individuals, require others in our existence for triangulation, as bearings or focal points of who we are. Community and democracy require input from other people to truly work and develop. In 1969, I had a professor at Eastern College in St. David’s, Pennsylvania, Dr. Tony Campolo, a sociology professor, who has had an even greater impact on me in the years since as I’ve read his books and contemplated his thoughts. Dr. Campolo points to a growing issue in our culture.

“While the would-be spiritual oracles fail to understand, our “advanced” capitalist social system is that the means have been devised to make spiritual realities somewhat unreal to us. More accurately, ways have been found in our consumer-oriented society to reduce spiritual hungers to emotions that can be gratified by purchasing the things being sold to us through the mass media.” Dr. Tony Campolo

Dr. Campolo is not just talking about church-related spiritual realities here. It is the gist of who we are, that inner aspect I will later refer to as soul, getting to know where we are in the world and why. The development and implementation of standardized testing have led society to use terms like human capital when viewing students. Human capital versus human needs: I can see why a mother would pull a second grader out of school because of testing. Education should be an interdisciplinary event. It should be all-encompassing, a live-in, a total undertaking. It is not the linear understanding of a schoolroom and class XYZ that many traditional teachers and administrators adhere to, and that legislators want. It involves more than just us; it involves the world and community.

“It is through a concern with problems as they relate to mankind at large that it may be possible to create the type of understanding that will enable man to use with wisdom, those tools which have made this century the most promising and the most perilous he has ever known.” Elliott Eisner

Examining our worldview, and how we communicate it to others and to ourselves, is important. How we educate and teach our children should be a major concern. What they take from a lesson and how they use it in their own lives can be significant if we provide the capabilities and allow this to happen. Sadly, through concerted effort, schools have been stripping away children’s individuality for the sake of standardization.

For many years now, I have embraced a different understanding of the world. In Native American culture, all is sacred: every leaf, twig, rock, animal, and human being. Spirituality can be as simple as walking out the door to a brilliant sunrise or full moon, as it inspires and fulfills us. I see education and curriculum similarly, as something sacred and spiritually fulfilling, more than a curriculum map on a wall next to the essential question of the day in learning-focused schools. It is not a static, fixed commodity some legislators want for ease of operation, and it can change with the group and community it operates within.

As I researched and read curriculum theorists, many are bringing back the sacredness of learning and understanding, and perhaps returning a culture lost in the search for it.

“The Community of truth, the grace of things, the transcendent subject, the ‘secret’ that ‘sits in the middle and knows’ – these images emerge, for me, from my experience of reality as sacred and of the sacred as real. Others may arrive at similar understandings from different starting points. But I believe that knowing, teaching, and learning are grounded in sacred soil and that renewing my vocation as a teacher requires cultivating a sense of the sacred.” Parker Palmer, 1998

Perhaps it is our end-of-course and graduation-test mentality that sets limits and parameters on our educative process. We have become so normalized through standardization and traditional molds that we have become limited in perceiving anything different. Throughout history, holy men and women, sages, and esotericisms have brought back pieces of what is truly there. Curriculum theory may be doing this with education. Bringing back what could be. Trying to keep children’s inner selves, their individuality, from coming out hinders learning and development as human beings.

Education and curriculum are alive, ongoing, and pervasive. It is not a limiting plan of strategies, as so many teachers and school systems presume. Can we view curriculum and education so broadly, encompassing everything about us, our lived experiences, and our curricula vitae? It becomes so difficult to be outside the box when everyone else is inside. But to learn to be real and to progress, we as educators must ruminate and see the more ultimate issues in life. We need to go beyond the content, beyond the traditional rhetoric of compliance with standards, and imagine and bring back that idea of democracy and the experience that living provides, suggested so long ago by Dewey. Teachers have much more to consider in education and curriculum than what is written down on paper.

“Education must ensure that not only the material, but the inward life of the individual be developed. Education should address not the isolated intellect, as the advocates of standards suggest it ought, but the hopes and dreams of the self of which intellect – the complex reflective self – is merely a part.” Allan Block

It has been a few years since I was introduced to Robert Fried’s books. My first principal back in 2001, who happened to be a recent principal of the year in Georgia, ran a book club for teachers.

“Passionate teachers organize and focus their passionate interests by getting to the heart of their subject and sharing with their students some of what lays there – the beauty and power that drew them to this field in the first place and that has deepened over time as they learned and experienced more. They are not after a narrow or elitist perspective, but rather a depth of engagement that serves as a base for branching out to other interests and disciplines. Robert Fried, The Passionate Teacher

It is about passion, bringing it to the classroom and passing it on to students, so as Fried states, “it will serve as a base for branching out.” There should be no limit to curriculum or education, as is so often imposed today. I recall reading many years ago that Henry David Thoreau told his friends that when he left teaching, he needed to be a learner first; only then could he be a good teacher. We need to set the example and be learners and in doing so pave the way, lay tracks for each of our students.

“From the beginning, learner choice, design, and revision infuses the work teachers and learners do together.” Foxfire Core Practice one, 2009

The late Syndicated columnist Sydney J. Harris wrote in the late 1970s about how education was like a sausage-stuffing machine and should be more like culturing a pearl. We are taking away the essence of who the child is; this essence is what is missing and what is being left behind. To leave no child behind, we are leaving bits and pieces of the individual human being behind. I would like to be optimistic and say, borrowing from the great civil rights leader, that as teachers, real teachers, “we shall overcome,” and we shall put soul back into our children’s bottles. I got a bit carried away today but keep everyone in harm’s way in your minds and hearts, and always give thanks, namaste.

My family and friends, I do not say this lightly,

Mitakuye Oyasin

(We are all related)

docbird