What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

ASSURING RESULTS AGAINST TARGETED EFFORT

Whatever exercises a student engages in, the outcome is the measure of that student’s success or failure. In a student’s life, there are short term results such as those that are obtained via examination of skill or competence and long term results that are not immediately apparent but are the outcomes of making good choices and obtaining good results based on those choices when the student is young.

In the present day, when most of us reflect back on how we suffered to obtain short term results in exams and then go on to never use them ever again, we must, as rational human beings, wonder whether the entire process was worth the effort.

Well, we all know that no effort is completely wasted but we also know that these efforts can be made to optimize impacts or, ensure what is known as result-efficiency. This is a measure of how far-reaching into the future a specific result in an examination or test or challenge really is and it is not that easy to measure in the short term.

In the short term, what can be done by a student is to carefully select the optimal mix of a) the student’s innate talents and capabilities, b) mainstream education milestones, and, c) general trends in skill importance for a changing world.

Obviously, this is not easy. The very facts that so many wrong mix-choices are made are attested to by the fact mentioned earlier about the general doubt of usefulness of common educational results.

The Steiner educators put in enormous effort to help each child find that mix of choices and in this, we are governed by the rule that education should be for vocation and not simply for an education. That is, education is not viewed by us as an end but rather, as a means to an end. That end is neither acing the IGCSE nor obtaining 9 A’s at the ordinary level. Those are simply collateral outcomes.  What Steiner does is ensure that any level of mainstream academic achievement will give each child the best opportunity to be a rounded out, well-adjusted student still to face greater learning challenges. As a very basic example, a child might have strong language skills, weak analytical skills and good aesthetic skills. In that event, expecting the child to become an engineer or lawyer will only condemn the child to years of frustration.  However, channeling the child’s innate abilities into creative writing, enabling superior showing in language and art related exams and good results in math and science, providing special high-level instruction in honing writing skills etc. will lay the foundation for the child to go on to higher education that will position him or her to capitalize and optimize on what has been learned at this level.

Towards this, the Steiner educators use a Systematic Analytical Framework (SAF) to provide the child with the best tools to face exams to optimize results and move on to using those results continuously and with complete relevance throughout life.

How does it work?