Students and teachers are human beings. Schools must bring this to light.
The Human Restoration Project (HRP) is an educational movement to transform school systems, restoring students as human beings rather than a vessel for standards. Led by educators Chris McNutt and Nick Covington, HRP contains reformative school resources, personalized professional development services, podcast, blog, and various materials geared toward changing mindsets in education.
The Human Restoration Project focuses on three elements of progressive education.
Purpose
What do you care about more than anything else? What defines your life and overall purpose? Sadly, the majority of students, or even adults, struggle in answering these questions.
Sometime between kindergarten and high school, a person's passion has dissipated. Forced learning of irrelevant subject matter and a lack of human-centered development means that the average student is never exposed to their unyielding life goal.
Passions must be explored. Because our society is increasingly apathetic and consumerist, we must be the advocates for our students and teachers to realize their purpose.
Creativity
All innovations are a result of creativity. Creatives are the game changers of society to move our world forward. However, schools do not function to embrace, or even encourage, creativity.
Schools are primarily designed with one thing in mind: data-driven instruction. Our entire system rests on test data, which is meant to exemplify "learning." However, these subjective tests will always have one only one correct answer.
Schools must express a system that reaches to the heart of a student's imagination and tap into their spirit, reminding them that there are always multiple answers to given problems.
Systems, Not Strategies
Our educational standards are rooted in a neoliberal system that does little to engage a student’s path to purpose.
According to data from Northeastern University, only one in five people use mathematics beyond an elementary level. Our country is one of the least democratically engaged, but drills students in US Government every year. The same core books are assigned in English classes, but reading rates are declining rapidly.
There needs to be a movement that reforms our current system of schooling and embraces local, specialty education that serves every student's capabilities and desires. Education won’t be drastically improved by simplistic teaching strategies. We need to change the system itself to promote student learning.
