Last night in karate, there was a discussion about Honor. The Sensei shared a story about her friend from college and how he asked her for help with the answers during a test.
"What was the right thing to do?"
Mini-pear's hand shot up immediately, "Help your friend."
A collective gasp from her classmates and an overwhelming raising of hands. The Sensei cocked her head, "Well, would that really be helping him?"
Mini-pear considered this for a moment, "Yes. He asked for your help. Help your friend."
Of course this was not the answer the Sensei was looking for, and of course Mini-pear's classmates were happy to set Mini-pear straight. At some point, she craned her neck to look over at me with a look best be described as outraged bewilderment. What was going on?
I'm quite proud of Mini-pear's moral compass. She cares for her friends and her family. She's thoughtful and considerate. She's honest and trustworthy. Parents of her friends frequently tell me how much they genuinely like her (for some reason, the phrase most frequently bandied about is, "She's a really cool kid") and on more than one occasion, someone has exclaimed, "She's so thoughtful!"
Okay, enough with the bragging. What I really want to talk about is school and what an artificial environment it is, how completely unsuited it is to prepare children for (and this is their term, not mine) the real world. I'm not advocating cheating, but I do believe that school, with its (often quite arbitrary) punishment and reward system, can set good people up for cheating. These same people would never even consider cheating in the real world. They would never dream of cutting corners to the detriment of someone else's safety, or deliberately benefiting from another's misfortune, or taking advantage of some one else's generous nature.
There are very few scenarios outside of academia where one is expected to regurgitate one's accumulated knowledge without benefit of referring to external resources. A highly skilled surgeon consults with her peers when deciding the best course of action to present to a patient. I hope the anesthesiologist, in calculating the correct dosage for someone of my height, weight, age, and medical condition, isn't relying on a memorized chart. I'm sure the mechanic who recently repaired my car probably referred to a manual or a computer program or a co-worker. It's not a brand specific shop, I don't expect a depth of knowledge about my aging Saturn sedan. From the flurries of evening and weekend text messages and phone calls, it would appear that Mr. Pear and his colleagues find their business grows and runs more smoothly when they brainstorm collectively. A lawyer doesn't sit in her office racking her brains to remember precedent setting cases, she looks it up. If she's lucky, there is a specialist in her office who concentrates in a particular area and can tell her the information she needs. It may save her hours of research to ask the right person. As long as she pulls her own weight and shares her own knowledge when asked, the co-worker should be happy to oblige.
Obviously, there is a certain level of knowledge expected in any number of given situations. These are usually quite specific. Emergency medical technicians and military personnel prepare and rehearse and follow a series of prescribed maneuvers designed to ensure success in a variety of unpredictable scenarios wherein people's lives are, quite literally, at stake. Within these scenarios, we rely on specialists. We don't expect an EMT to be able to fix the ambulance as well as the patient.
Mr. Pear can't read a knitting pattern to save his life. Luckily, I don't think anyone's ever needed a knitting pattern to save their life. If it interested me, I'm sure I'm capable of setting up a firewall on our home computer. It doesn't particularly interest me, and I'd rather spend the time I'd waste on that steep learning curve doing something I truly enjoy, or something that serves my family in some other way. Mr. Pear can set up a firewall standing on his head. I'll leave it to him.
Have you ever used a cheat sheet? Maybe you smuggled one into an exam once. Or maybe it's a crumpled sheet of paper tucked into your camera bag because, try as you might, you've never managed to commit aperture and light speed settings to memory.
Kids in school are told all the time that they need to step up, be responsible for their own actions, set and achieve goals. And then they have to raise their hand and ask to use the toilet. Have things changed? In my blue-ribbon award winning high school, you couldn't politely excuse yourself, you had to wave your hand in the air before someone else decided if this was a good time for you to move your bowels.
Why should a key member of the school's soccer team's participation depend on his memorizing the U.S presidents in order? Maybe history just isn't his thing. No matter if he excels in Biology and Math. If he drops below average in History and Creative Writing, he's off the team. Does that make sense, from a real world perspective? On the soccer field, he's doing a whole lot more than playing a game. It's up to the individual as to what they get out of any given pursuit, but let's imagine that this boy motivates his team mates. 15 years down the line, he motivates the employees of his own small business (which has nothing to with History or Creative Writing whatsoever) in the same way. Pushing his body to new limits is also his focus. He's very disciplined in this respect. He will apply this discipline, this confidence in himself and what he can do when he puts his mind to it, to whatever comes his way.
But he fails the history exam and is benched from the team. And the lesson he learns here is that he's a failure, that he's stretched himself too thin with his extra-curricular activities, that he's incapable of mastering at least five different academic subjects at the same time. When else do we expect that of someone? Quitting the soccer team or dropping his paper route are the only things under his control. He's not allowed to decide that it's the History class that tips the scales, because someone else has determined the information imparted there is somehow more important to his future success than soccer.
I think that's ridiculous.
I will send a present to anyone who can list the U.S. presidents in order in comments without looking them up. Just know that I will have to look it up in order to check your work.
Some days I feel like all we do is run from one activity to the next. The activities themselves aren't particularly tiring, and Mini-Pear certainly isn't showing any Over-scheduled Child symptoms, but I think I sort of hit a wall on busy days. 
