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 knowledge, teachers help students overcome challenges, foster their intrinsic motivation, and provide them with the tools necessary to achieve academic and personal success.

The next time you are teaching a lesson, count how many questions the students are asked.

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

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 further restrict curricula. They reduce opportunities to explore creativity in subjects. They reduce a course to its quantitative essence and, in doing so, reduce 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 seems to be the perfect solution to solving the world's food problems, this method, while apparently producing larger and faster harvests, has three major flaws: first, the end product it 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 to control it at every step, which must affect your overall enjoyment during the growing 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 also suffer in similar ways:

First, when they leave their education with a wealth of credentials (if they made it through the system), they may lack a real depth of knowledge and problem-solving ability. This is because the learning has been too superficial, focusing only on the aspects of the course 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 get off track, get dirty, and find solutions to get out of the mud. Necessity is the mother of invention, but when students never have those types 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 in the school building, sitting for long periods of time in rows of desks and being herded from one class to lunch to another class under the strict rhythm of 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 that they will not enjoy school.

Teaching Curiosities

Even well-intentioned teachers can fall into the clutches of the system, themselves operating in fear of not covering the required territory. In fact, it is an impossible task to teach the required amount of material in most subjects at any level of depth in an average class. To curb students' natural inclination to disengage in that learning context, schools superficially inoculate their students with countless lectures, warning against disengagement and punishing the guilty in an attempt to quell it. It is no wonder that students may feel that their paths of learning and growth have become stifling, one-way, and oppressive. No wonder they rarely, if ever, link learning to happiness.

Third, due to the superficiality of the learning required for standardized testing and the lack of foundation in knowledge creation, the transfer of learning to new contexts is limited. The process offers few rewards after the exam period and does little to sustain the student, or even the community around them. The student raised in the hothouse of standardized testing strives to think creatively, solve new problems, and ultimately flourish and contribute in an ever-changing 21st century world.

The emerging adult is certainly not going to spring up and inspire the next generation, but rather will depend on and deplete the world around him to stay alive.