"We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will help you get there." - Howard Gartner

The above quote comes from a book my brother game me called, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ.

Many of the most successful people (whether you measure financially or in terms of happiness and/or relationships), weren't very good students. IQ has only a 20% correlation to financial success and very little correlation to other success measurements.

Our culture can be so narrowly focused and while certainly it makes sense to make sure kids are proficient readers and capable thinkers, our new testing obsessed approach imposes an overly narrow focus in our approach to education.