My name is Andrew, and my wife and I recently attended the 2015 ABE conference. We were so excited to see the growing trend of people who have felt and believe the same things we do in regards to the learning and overall education of our children. The topic of education has always been a strong one between my wife and I. I was raised by a wonderful mother who also taught public school throughout my entire life. She is a 3rd generation school teacher, so I was raised that education is eternally important, though I have always  felt like much of my schooling experience was not overly beneficial. My wife struggled in school, feeling as though she wasn’t grasping concepts as quickly as she was expected to, and this caused a great deal of anxiety during her school years. Because of these backgrounds, we have always questioned what we would do with our own children, and when the moment of decision making came, we chose to follow the traditional route and put our oldest in public school. What I learned through this decision would change my perspective forever.

To give you a bit of background on me, I was an employee for nearly ten years at a company in Utah County called US Synthetic, a Shingo Prize winning manufacturer of diamond cutters, and half that time was spent as either a factory manager or in organizational development. My leadership expertise and focus was as a cultural change agent, teaching problem solving and continuous improvement/lean manufacturing concepts and principles to the teams that I led. I loved my work, and I loved seeing my teams get engaged and come up with outstanding solutions for simple and complex problems that existed in the worksite. Toward the end of 2013, a colleague called and offered me a job as a production manager in the Chicagoland area. My wife and I accepted, and we moved right at the beginning of 2014. I spent the last year and nine months there, and during that time is when I began to learn and realize some astounding truths about people’s behavior, beliefs, and attitudes I had always thought were just “normal.”

The main role of both my factory manager and production manager roles was to create a team culture of continuous improvement utilizing the principles and concepts of lean manufacturing. In other words, my job was to motivate and get teams engaged to be actively involved in creating a culture of problem solving and continuously improving the worksite around them. To create a successful culture, people must feel safe, respected, and comfortable being open to offering suggestions to their peers and their leaders. This is much more difficult than it sounds, but I had always wondered why. What made it so difficult to get responsible, mature, capable adults that are all educated and empowered to make positive changes in their world around them? It was something that fascinated me, and I was excited to learns the reasons why.

As I have watched the behaviors of over a thousand people over the last seven years of leadership, I have realized a pattern in people’s thinking. About one in ten can see a problem/opportunity, analyze it, and as long as they know they have the opportunity to make changes to their worksite, they take advantage and make improvements. They are not concerned about the rejection or opinion of others, and they seem to trust that their leadership will support the decisions and changes they make. About three to four out of those ten take a great deal of support from their leader and team, motivation, and in constant conversations from their leaders about how they could see their conditions be a bit different and hopefully better. This support and continuous effort of conversation always took between three to six months, both in Chicago and in Utah. The last four or so are very difficult to motivate or get engaged, sometimes taking over a year, and one to two seem to never really get engaged. The comment seemed to repeatedly be from this latent and refusing group, “I’m just here to do my work and go home. Management gets paid the big bucks to make those decisions.”

After realizing the results were the same both in Utah and Illinois, I started researching why this might be, hoping to better teach and motivate people to problem solve and create a better condition and world around them. This was the beginning of 2015, and I was determined to understand what I was seeing around me on a day to day basis. I had spent a year understanding the circumstances, and was ready to start making big strides forward. Around the same time, my wife confronted me and said she felt as though we should pull our oldest child out of school and homeschool her, mostly because we would be coming back to Utah for me to have a surgery, and she would miss too much time from school. She was only in kindergarten, so though I was hesitant, I decided it wouldn’t be too much of a set back, and I trusted her suggestion. My wife quickly found some highly rated curriculum, and the schooling at home began. Within a couple weeks, I realized that in the short five months my child had been in school, she had developed the habit of compartmentalizing “learning” time and “play” time. It was as though the only thing she had been taught was that she had to go through the motions, be submissive, and tolerate whatever information was being fed to her. She thought learning was meant for school time only, and she was even quite opposed to the idea of reading outside of school time. I was shocked because both my wife and I have such a love of learning and seeking truth. I decided that I also needed to understand why my daughter would develop these behaviors so quickly, and started researching how common this circumstance was.

Over the course of six months I dug for answers. I read books, watched TED Talks, documentaries, read blogs, and had endless discussions with my wife. My paradigm of education quickly began to change, and as I had realizations about the effect of public education, I also started to realize that those effects were causing the exact results I was seeing in the workplace. I realized that our current system of education was creating answer centered thinkers who expected to be fed the knowledge they “needed” to know in life. I realized that as they were following the system of downloading information, then regurgitating that information, whether on tests or otherwise, they were developing behaviors and attitudes of dependence on people in places of power. Being able to problem solve through simple obstacles in life become more difficult, as no one is around to just give answers, and over time, a dependent society emerged, willing to quickly blame those in power for the struggles and challenges they faced. I realized the paradigm of “failure” was a concept children never understood until their adult influences taught that doing something or knowing something other than the way they as adults did was unacceptable. In addition, not having enough of the right answers potentially made them fail, or at least less intelligent than their youthful peers. These are the experiences that nearly every child has faced for the last fifty years or longer, and for the first 18 years of their lives. These are the experiences that cause fear of rejection, or fear of failure, the struggles I was trying to help the employees I was working with overcome. Trying to teach the concept that “failing” is really just learning, a stepping stone to finding the natural laws and truths of our world, was next to impossible for people who had practiced the behavior since elementary school.

When I began to internalize these truths, when I saw my child compartmentalize learning, I realized that if she stayed on the current “socially acceptable” path, she would likely become the same seven to nine individuals who I had struggled leading and motivating for the past ten years. My wife and I both decided through inspiration that we should move back to Utah, and be advocates for change in the education system in this state. We want Utah to be a beacon for the world on how to live life, how to learn, how to let children grow in truth, and how to develop healthy confidence for the work they spend their entire youth preparing to accomplish. We want our children to be confident in themselves. We want them to be capable individuals who are a testimony to the world that the family is the central unit for learning and development of mind, body, and spirit, that every person has talents and gifts to fulfill a calling in this life, and that the Lord will provide a path for every child to learn what they need in order to accomplish their mission on this Earth. We believe that path should not be dictated by the compulsory systems of men and the world, but by the inspiration and loving care of parents who know best for their children, allowing them the agency to discover what their purpose in life truly is.

Thank you,

Andrew Naugle

Results of Compartmentalized Learning in Public Education