Education is an intensely personal experience.

Education is an intensely personal experience. It cannot be gained from books, tests or assignments. Although they can help form an education they are not the basis for it. The basis is the person’s experiences, reactions and thoughts. This can be found in many places, in the most unexpected ways and have impacts much larger than anything we can convey in a classroom. Each person who sits in a classroom has a different experience in the class with no two being the same despite being taught the same things. Each person brings a different level of experience, understanding and thought process to each situation.  Each person has experiences outside the classroom that no one else in the classroom can have. This affects how they perceive things. Classrooms should be about expanding on these experiences, providing more places for thought provoking discussion and following trains of thought to their logical conclusions. Education should not be about test scores or getting everyone to be the same by expecting the same things from them. Everyone is not the same. We should stop expecting all our students to be the same.