It's no secret that children learn at different rates and in different ways. Parents see these differences from their kids' earliest years. One child reads at four, another at six. One loves to draw, another to build forts in the backyard.
Parents also know that children learn by doing.
They are not passive observers of the world they inhabit. Teachers understand these differences in child development, but unlike parents, teachers are required to track their students by age, test scores and grade levels. This approach to education not only ignores reality, it ignores the individual child and caters to the general characteristics of the group. But research and public pressure are changing the way children are taught. Many educators are now teaching to the learning styles of individual students and developing new means of assessing that learning.