I just got back from a series of school visits for my book research. It is always re-invigorating to get back into schools, and these visits were particularly interesting because they were to schools that have instructional approaches which are fairly new to me. I was particularly struck by my visit to the MET Schools in Providence, RI, schools which approach learning in a very different way than traditional secondary schools.

The underlying philosophy is that human beings are situational learners, namely, that we learn things best when we learn them in the context in which we need to know them. Certainly, this makes sense. Young children learn by doing, and they learn to do whatever they need to do at any given moment in order to explore, navigate and master the environment they are in. If a child lives in a community where people speak only Mandarin, he learns Mandarin.

If she is in a household of people who are deaf-mute, she will learn to communicate in sign language. If children are provided with environments that require them to climb, read, weave baskets, ride bicycles, milk cows, or forage for food, they will learn these skills. This is how human beings have always learned.

I was excited when I opened the Denver Post op-ed page last week. There was an op-ed written by William Moloney, former Colorado Commissioner of Education, that was titled “Standards and assessments: Education reform’s bridge to nowhere.”

Sigmund Freud’s classic definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over yet always expecting different results — seems not to have registered with American education reformers who endlessly propose look-alike standards and assessments they claim will really, really work this time.

So far, so good. American attempts at improving education since the early 1900s have centered on setting up content standards, assessing students on the amount of information they have retained, and rewarding teachers based on how well students perform. Yet, there appears to be a general consensus that we are not where we want to be. Our latest response is the current educational reform environment where Common Core State Standards and the aligned standardized PARCC assessments are experiencing a wave of opposition nationwide from parents, students, educators and a politically-diverse range of interest and advocacy groups. The response?