Smart & Wise

Florence Matusky proposes that K-12 public education's primary focus on one hemisphere only (the left-brain) - to be test smart, not wise - produces students whose impoverished, "approved" knowledge is not for understanding self, others, or how to live, but for programming them with by-the-book, academic knowledge then reducing them to numbers. The rationale for flourish or perish ensures failures and dropouts; fosters poverty, crime, violence, addictions, greed, or selfishness; and jeopardizes two of America's Four Freedoms (freedom from fear and want). No one comes into this world and to school with a clean slate. We are born self-centered to get our survival needs met and with inherited and experiential embedded data from conception onward. All children and adults need to express their significance. When children experience being loved, respected, and their embedded true life stories - which are played out as behavior, appearance, and capacity to learn in school - are heard, understood, and accepted, then they learn to love, respect, and accept themselves and others "as is." Released from ego deficits and negativity, they are present to their full human intelligence. When the invisible curriculum (self-awareness, humane redevelopment, emotional resilience, virtues, and character) is not taught and modeled at home and in K-12 public schools, children's uneducated egos and passion and/or lack of meaning and respect override cognition, creating anti-social acts and unsafe societies. As adults, many seek significance outside themselves: power-over people, wealth, and/or the world's stage, creating wars, economic bubbles, income inequality, and declining human qualities and inner lives. Our societal ills are reflections of The Western Intellectual Tradition's legacy. Smart & Wise offers reasons for and solutions to America's quantitative, unequal public schools so students may rise to their higher faculties and excel in math, reading, science, innovation, communications, and relationships.