Find the Way Out

Let’s return to Aesop. As it turns out, his fables contain nuggets of wisdom that apply to many of life’s pressures. Interesting moral lessons may indeed be found here, but how do they apply to education? For those who feel they are in a virtual pressure cooker as they teach our nation’s children, this fable offers some insights. Are we grooming the outside of the “horse” (our students) through polished performances on tests and neglecting the real “food” of fostering a love of learning? It might be interesting to discuss who is really profiting from the high-stakes testing promoted by our “what-to-learn” culture.

Without being cynical, it is appropriate for thinking educators to ask hard questions of those who form educational policy. In fact, it may be useful to share this fable at a faculty meeting, using the interactive method outlined in Chapter One. Meaningful dialogue goes a long way toward helping us find solutions. Take any one item from the preceding list and spend some time sharing the pressures you are feeling. Perhaps generating a corporate-style list of the pros and cons of high-stakes testing would be helpful. Raising academic standards does not have to mean increased pressure for teachers. Let’s purpose to make meaning of the struggles.

A New Life

In 1952, my family returned from England to the United States, where I was eager to begin fourth grade in the small town of Bridgeville, Delaware (population 3,500). My father was now out of the military and had returned to his hometown to help my grandfather on the family farm. It was Labor Day, and the roadside market that they ran was particularly busy, so I was amusing myself by playing on the tractor that was standing idle in the field. Before I knew what happened, I had slid from the smooth surface of the tractor’s body where I was relaxing on my stomach and slammed hard onto the ground, breaking my arm in two places.

Being a very religious child (even though I had not seen Jesus under the drape at school in England!), I quickly ran up to the house, fell on my knees, and in a wild, tearful prayer asked God to help me! There was no immediate evidence of such assistance, but I marched bravely to the market and fearfully told my parents about my mishap. They were not too pleased to have to take me to the hospital that day, the busiest of the year. Looking back now, I know it was not a hard-hearted response but a fearful one. We were counting on the income from the sale of our produce.

The moments of my life surged like a pulse, and my memories of them shape me still. The idea of having to walk into a new school with a cast on my arm kept me awake and in tears the night before. Any sense of joy in going to school was quickly overshadowed by a deep insecurity and sadness because of my accident. Would I be laughed at or teased? I was a year younger and smaller than my peers, having begun school in England at the age of four, and that made me even more vulnerable. So I began fourth grade with a cast on my right arm, forcing me to write with my left. This seemed to place me in a very precarious academic position. I not only had to adjust to a very different school culture than the one I had just left but also spoke with a peculiar English accent, and my handwriting looked like I had subnormal intelligence. My teacher, Miss Scott, had certain very proper ways of running a classroom, and never having encountered a child who had been schooled in England before, was not quite sure what to do with me. In the end, I was givenan F in handwriting, and was sent off to the fifth grade in the hopes I could do better.

In addition to these humbling experiences, my father and mother were going through the postwar stresses thatmany families had in those days, so life at home became quite noisy and argumentative. I withdrew more and more into a private world that I could order, and I brought my younger brother, Jackie, along with me. On one memorable occasion, there was a fierce argument going on in the kitchen, then a terrific bang. The pressure cooker had exploded and pieces of macaroni hung everywhere. Jackie and I looked on in wonder asMom and Dad trembled at their good fortune that the lid, which had made a great hole in the ceiling, had not fallen on their heads!

Opening The Skylight

I CAN REMEMBER, as a child, seeing a skylight for the first time. The ability to see clouds and blue sky through the roof gave me a thrilling sense of delight. It meant the ceiling did not have the last word. It meant endless possibilities, imagination, vision, dreams. Today, as an educator, I have several skylights in my home that continue to remind me of a world in which there are no limits, only possibilities. That is what this book is about.

As teachers we operate in a world of limits. There are time lines, deadlines, tests that have ceilings, students who have limitations. We desperately need to find the skylights. What exactly are these windows in the roof in relation to our noble profession? I will try to build the case that skylights relate to thinking, learning, assessment, and intelligence.


We underrate our brains and our intelligence. Formal education has become such a complicated and overregulated activity that learning is widely regarded as something difficult that the brain would rather not do. Is it possible that the brain yearns to learn and that good teaching can actually improve the way the brain functions? This is the idea that the skylight represents. This opening in the ceiling implies a lifting of restrictions, unimagined possibilities, a transcending of the predictable. So what do I mean by intelligence?

Intelligence may be best described as an abstract concept, such as beauty or honesty, rather than one that is concrete. The attributes beauty and honesty are measurable, but with greater or lesser objectivity, depending on who is doing the evaluating. And it is certainly agreed that these attributes can change over time. So it is with intelligence.

Intelligence, I would argue, is not a concrete thing, like a house or an egg crate composed of rooms or cells. Nor is it a trait of an individual—such as blue eyes—that cannot be changed. Intelligence is better viewed as a state that is fully able to be changed under the right conditions (Feuerstein, 2007).

A more complete and compelling definition of intelligence for our purposes as educators is this (Feuerstein, 2002):

Intelligence is more correctly defined as the continuous changing state of a person best reflected in the way that individual is able to use previous experiences to adapt to new situations.

The concept is in fact summed up by the words the ability to learn from what has been learned. This propensity for flexibility and dynamic unpredictability is within every learner. This assurance that each individual has the propensity for change becomes the real joy of teaching. In fact, believing in these new possibilities can help us adjust what might be an outdated concept in our own thinking—that intellectual potential is static, unchanging. Let’s begin to unwrap some new concepts.