Guiding students is a fundamental task in the educational process. Teachers play a crucial role in providing guidance, support, and direction to students as they seek to acquire knowledge and develop skills. Through their experience and expertise, teachers help students overcome challenges, foster their intrinsic motivation, and provide them with the tools necessary to achieve academic and personal success.

Next time you are giving a lesson, count how many questions are asked of the students.

When students are guided and confined to the narrow path of standardized tests, they are instilled with such a fear of failure that only a fool would dare venture outside the conventional. After all, we are talking about young people and we can hardly expect them to rebel against it (considering this, you might want to reconsider those students who actually do). The consequences of straying are so severe: the promise of not finding a job, the shame of failure, the school's wrath. It is no wonder, then, that students are afraid to take risks and think for themselves, and why so many unnecessary questions are inevitably asked.

To make matters worse, when governments decide, in their wisdom, that the solution to ensuring progress in education is to further standardize testing, they force schools to restrict curricula even more. They reduce opportunities to explore creativity within subjects. They reduce a course to its quantitative essence and, in doing so, diminish students' opportunities to develop problem-solving strategies. Basically, they force schools to produce hydroponic students.

Teaching Students in Authentic Contexts

While using hydroponics to grow fruits and vegetables may seem like the perfect solution to the world’s food problems, this method, although it produces seemingly larger and faster crops, has three major flaws: first, the end product lacks real nutrients and substance, and ultimately, flavor.

Secondly, the plant itself grows in a very unnatural and toxic state, absorbing excessive amounts of chemicals and pesticides used to control it at every step, which must affect its overall enjoyment during the growth process. And thirdly, once the plant has been harvested and the process is finished, it leaves no positive legacy; in fact, it depletes the surrounding soil. When students are educated in unnatural conditions with the sole purpose of producing quantifiable results, they suffer similarly:

First, when they finish their education with a large number of credentials (if they managed to get through the system), they may lack real depth of knowledge and the ability to solve problems. This is because learning has been too superficial, focusing only on the course aspects that must be learned for standardized tests. Like the roots of the hydroponic plant, the brain's synapses are not stimulated to expand and strengthen because there is no opportunity or need to do so. The more prescriptive the learning, the less opportunity the student has to go off the path, get their hands dirty, and find solutions to get out of the mud. Necessity is the mother of invention, but when students never have those kinds of opportunities, they lose the ability to think quickly and, eventually, to think for themselves in most situations.

Second, if students spend day after day locked inside the school building, sitting for long periods in rows of desks and being marched from one class to lunch and then to another class to the strict rhythm of the bells, the process of distancing young people from their natural condition is underway. If students are bombarded with useless and irrelevant information disguised as learning, it is obvious they will not enjoy school.

Teaching Curiosities

Even well-intentioned teachers can fall into the system’s traps, operating themselves with the fear of not covering the required territory. In fact, it is an impossible task to teach the amount of material stipulated for most subjects at any depth in an average class. To curb students’ natural tendency to disconnect in that learning context, schools superficially inoculate their students with countless sermons, warning against disengagement and punishing the guilty in an attempt to stifle it. No wonder students may feel that their paths of learning and growth have become suffocating, one-way, and oppressive. No wonder they rarely, if ever, associate learning with happiness.

Third, because of the superficiality of the learning required for standardized tests and the lack of a foundation in knowledge creation, transfer of learning to new contexts is limited. The process offers few rewards after the examination period and does little to sustain the student, or even the community around them. The student raised in the greenhouse of standardized testing struggles to think creatively, solve novel problems, and ultimately to flourish and contribute in a constantly changing 21st-century world.

The emerging adult certainly will not sprout and inspire the next generation; rather, they will depend on and deplete the world around them to stay alive.