Here in the Age of Standards and Testing, we begin with the question: “How smart do we want our kids to be?” But I find more leverage in flipping that around and asking, “How do we want our kids to be smart?”

That's a much better question, I think. It says that we value diversity, individuality, and adaptability in a rapidly changing world. It's comforting to think that the right set of standards will get all of our kids where they need to go, but we know they'll be going to different places or the same places via different routes; each will have to be smart in his or her own way.

As important as the question may be, the fact that we don't ask it suggests that we probably don't have a good answer. Or that the answers we have are too divisive to be discussed.

Here's my answer, though you may think I'm cheating: I want kids to be smart about the education they choose to receive. I also want them to be smart about how they involve themselves in the world. What concerns me is not the quality of education we can provide but the quality of education we choose to provide. We are a wealthy and innovative nation. We can do just about anything we set our minds to. But every so often I come across things that suggest to me that certain types of educational experiences are off limits, and that even the way we want our kids to value their education may not be serving them as well as it could.

Here’s a piece from The Atlantic illustrating what seems to me a strange occurrence. High school kids petitioned their school board to include one student representative in the superintendent selection process. This student would be an observer and advisor only with no voting rights. Sounds like a great idea to me and a great experience to afford to a mature student with an interest in school governance. But the school board turned the proposal down.

Here’s a wonderful book called “The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way”. It would be nice if our kids were featured as the world’s smartest, but in the view of author Amanda Ripley, U.S. learners lose out to their counterparts in countries like Poland instead. Her thesis about why American kids don’t seem to do as well in school as kids do in other countries is not one I'd heard before, but I think it cuts to the quick of why we aren’t making the progress we want.

Here’s Dan Willingham’s review of Ripley’s book with a pithy and powerful statement of her thesis: “According to Ripley, there is a primary postulate running through the psyche of South Koreans, Finns, and Poles when it comes to education: an expectation that the work will be hard. Everything else is secondary. So anything that gets in the way, anything that compromises the work, will be downplayed or eliminated. Sports, for example. Kids do that on their own time, and it's not part of school culture.”

Culture. That's often the magic word, isn't it?

I see a pattern here that suggests that we have not yet committed ourselves to creating a culture where education is a top priority in the lives of our children. I think we want it to be. And we certainly say that it is. But our results don’t match our rhetoric. Is education the top priority for the kids in your family? It wasn’t in mine, and my mom was a teacher. Don’t get me wrong here: education mattered a lot but I always felt that a few other things mattered more.

In some families I knew, education did seem like the top priority. And now, as an adult, I sometimes feel uncomfortably uneducated in relation to other people I know. I do not blame this on my parents. They did everything they could to get me the best education possible. But there was something about school, right from the first day of kindergarten, that never made sense to me, and still doesn’t. Even though I did reasonably well, I didn’t care much about academic achievement. Doing interesting work—and, yes, playing sports—was more important to me. But the work that interested me and the work that interested my teachers was often different. And I certainly wasn't good enough at sports to get any special academic consideration.

In the unceasing and vociferous debate about education in America, I think questions regarding academic culture and the values we have about intellectual achievement are foundational ones that should always be part of the national dialog because they ask us to look inwardly at ourselves instead of inciting us to wag a moralistic finger at others.

We can blame every institution, policy, practice, and person we can think of. Or we can take ownership of the situation by eliminating blame and focusing on root causes like educational and intellectual culture in our schools, our homes, and in our nation as a whole. Our systems, structures, and standards may not be failing us at all. Rather, we might be failing ourselves by inadvertently de-valuing education relative to other aspects of our children's lives.

While I see this as a problem, I also see it as perhaps the best problem for us to solve because it is so fundamental and because each of us has control over how we choose to contribute to this kind of culture change.

It doesn’t take an act of Congress, a new state law, or a mandated district curriculum for us to improve the way we contribute to education culture. We don’t even have to have school-age kids or work in a school to do it. Culture is the thing over which we have the most individual control. I think that promoting a highly valued learning culture in our schools and in our country is the single best reform we can pursue.