Chapter 2: A Window Toward Expanded Experiences: Exposing Today’s Limited Menu of Classroom Offerings and Asking for More Variety

In the current educational era of top-down mandates and high-stakes standardized tests, I often wonder, how did things get to this point? When students and teachers spend disproportionate hours on preparing for a single test, how did picking “the” right answer become such a priority? Shouldn’t schools be expanding possibilities for students instead of limiting options? When the outside world has advanced so quickly in the past century, what has kept the inner functioning of schools largely unchanged? Should a place that students spend so much time not help expand their vision of the outside world instead of closing down connections? With calls for education reform being ubiquitous over the past 100 years, what is preventing the “change” that so many claim is needed? How can we possibly go from the way things currently are to the way they ought to be?