“Everyone knows the ultimate purpose of public education is to ensure that all children learn how to use their minds well.”

Seems the Rethink Learning Now campaign, launched September 8, 2009, would have been hard pressed to come up with a less original or more obvious idea. But, if it’s so obvious, why isn’t every school doing it?

Today, too many schools still reflect an Industrial-age philosophy about the proper management of human beings. In fact, although schools have changed some in the last one hundred years, most are still organized to impart a largely fact-based, rote-oriented curriculum through structures that do not allow long-term teacher-student relationships or in-depth study.

We can end the nationwide culture of testing, and create a national culture of learning instead. And we can start to do so by reflecting on what we already know to be true about powerful learning, seeing which elements are most essential to those experiences, and then holding ourselves and our elected officials accountable for supporting policies that empower educators to create those sorts of learning environments for all children.

Supported by leading education advocates, civil rights groups, professional networks and philanthropic organizations, the Rethink Learning Now campaign invites parents, educators, elected officials, and young people to share learning experiences and identify the attributes that made those experiences successful.

The campaign is currently working to establish clarity around its core objectives: powerful learning, highly-effective teaching, and a system that is committed to ensuring fairness. The next step is to use qualitative data to create specific proposals that help build healthy, productive learning environments.

According to Sam Chaltain, national director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, “As the number of stories grows over time, we’ll see which attributes appear most often across people’s experiences. The purpose is to focus the country’s attention on powerful learning, and on the core conditions that best support it, so that all of us can be more prepared to ask our lawmakers, our President, and our local communities to institute reforms based more clearly on what young people need in order to thrive and stay in school.”