Just the other day, I awoke to the news that Pluto is not a planet. However, I definitely recall receiving an "A" on my fourth grade science project...a three-dimensional diorama of nine planets made out of colorful clays hanging by strings and rotating around the sun. So...was Pluto never a planet, or is Pluto no longer a planet, or are there other planets beyond Pluto? Should my fourth grade report card be revised?

This is only one of many examples, and there are several alone in the school subject we call Science, that illustrates my point that "facts" are not always hard and fast truth, but instead change with progress in technology, with new knowledge and theories, and with the asking of innovative questions. One reason that multiple choice questions are often more difficult than the "fill in the blank" type of questions is that sometimes there is more than one answer to a question if ALL the possibilities are considered. The obvious "correct" answer to most of us might be the wrong answer to a true genius who sees a possibility most of us are overlooking.

Given the rapid increase in mankind's ability to discover more complex truths about the world around us, educating our children should be more about teaching them to formulate quality questions than teaching them to memorize all the right answers. Right answers today may become tomorrow's errors. Real learning is the ability to look with fresh eyes, see what hasn't been seen before, and to think through the possibilities. If a child is led to believe that all that all the answers are in the textbook, what need is there for him to think outside the box (or book), to ask his own questions, to hypothesize on the unknown?

One of the things I've experienced in my homeschooling journey is that is very hard to divide up life into neatly packaged subjects and learning into packets of facts. The best learning, like the best writing, doesn't give a student all the answers but spurs him find his own. In homeschooling any "subject", several other subjects always seem to converge. Earth, never mind the entire Universe, is too complicated a place to easily unravel one strand of knowledge or truth from the effects that strand has on the whole.

The complexity of life, from the microscopic level to the infinite reaches of space, requires that we leave room for more than just facts in our teaching. Learning must involve questions, imagination, possibilities, and creativity, not just filling in the circle next to the right answer. In teaching children, we must never confuse memorization with real learning. While the faceless, nameless people who write standardized tests would have us believe those pencilled-in circles are the ultimate measures of intelligence, we must never forget the words of Albert Einstein..."Imagination is more important than knowledge."