Weight training works by pushing muscles to breaking point and then allowing them to recover, and grow. Formal education doesn't work this way. It supports and guides, providing children with a safe environment to acquire knowledge.
We already exerience information overload, so it seems pretty likely that a couple of key skills for our future society will be the ability to learn and the ability to filter.
So, how do we prepare children for this reality? Do we guide them through a supporting learning experience or do we throw them into chaos?
As my children flit from one project to the other, from one interest to the next, I've begun to realise that what they're learning isn't the topic itself but something more meta. They're exercising their learning muscles, learning to learn, learning to filter.
I'm understanding that I can't teach them what they want to know; instead they're developing the parts of their brains that help them to do that for themselves. And my role becomes much more about getting out of the way, much more about connecting them with the chaos.