Children, after all, are not just adults-in-the-making. They are people whose current needs and rights and experiences must be taken seriously.

Standardized testing has swelled and mutated, like a creature in one of those old horror movies, to the point that it now threatens to swallow our schools whole.

In a word, learning is decontextualized. We break ideas down into tiny pieces that bear no relation to the whole. We give students a brick of information, followed by another brick, followed by another brick, until they are graduated, at which point we assume they have a house. What they have is a pile of bricks, and they don't have it for long.

How can we do our best when we are spending our energies trying to make others lose - and fearing that they will make us lose?

The race to win turns us all into losers.

Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children

Social psychology has found the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.