Any day now, the Profile of Learning will be tossed onto the trash heap. Its repeal seems as inevitable as an invasion of Iraq.

My family wasn’t living in Minnesota when the Profile was imposed on schools, but even a brief skimming of newspaper archives shows that right from the beginning, voices have been complaining about them. It creates too much paperwork, assert some of the teachers and counselors in our schools. It’s too hard or confusing for our kids, say some parents. It’s too weird or silly, proclaim some politicians and newspaper columnists. The complaints have gotten louder as the years have gone by, though many complaints have been neither fair nor based on a full picture of the Profile.

One result of repeal will be a lot of waste: all the money the state and schools invested in it and all the energy that teachers, counselors and administrators put into curriculum design. Whether the students are actually learning things under the Profile or if it was a big waste of time for them, too, doesn’t seem to be a question that matters.

My exposure to the Profile of Learning has come via my children’s experiences as students. From this perspective, then, I have to ask why the Profile has earned such a bad reputation? My kids haven’t had major problems completing Profile standards as compared to other assignments. The projects seem well integrated into their learning. Some have actually been interesting, certainly more interesting than taking more quizzes and filling in the blanks on more worksheets.

Given this experience, I don’t think the Profile has been given enough time. We don’t yet have a complete picture of the advantages and disadvantages of a standard focused on the process of learning instead of on the end result. When tax cuts are enacted or regulations about workplaces or the environment are eliminated, we are asked to be patient, to give the marketplace time to provide results, but when it comes to education assessment and reform, we want instant gratification.

I hope that many of the more positive changes brought about by the Profile are retained, regardless of what the new standards say.

For example, I’ve heard the disparaging comments about how, under the Profile, students learned how to read encyclopedias while &uot;real&uot; standards make them demonstrate they know what the encyclopedia says. In this information age, where we are literally inundated with facts and figures every day, I think knowing how to find and evaluate the sources of information &045; knowing how to &uot;read&uot; the encyclopedia &045; is an extremely valuable skill. I would rather teach children how to sort out what’s relevant and useful from garbage than have them memorize a certain number of &uot;facts&uot; about anything.

There’s a bigger issue lurking behind this repeal of the Profile, however. Many of the people now in power think that the end result of a curriculum, based on a test score, is the only way to evaluate schools. In their &uot;model&uot; of education, the students are all empty vessels (or tabula rasa, empty slates, to use an older phrase) who enter a classroom in order to have their brains filled up with information by the experts, their teachers.

Unfortunately, this is a big step backwards from what we now know about how children learn and what skills are needed for success at work and in life. It’s an attempt to surreptitiously impose a statewide &045; even a nationwide &045; curriculum for public schools, without open discussion and debate about what’s really going on.

In the end, whether we’re talking about retaining or replacing the Profile of Learning, we’re talking about politicians in St. Paul trying to micromanage public education. So when the new graduation standards and basic skills tests are in place, I think the people who created them should be the first to take them. If the tests really cover what people need to know in order to be successful in adult life, passing should be a breeze. Still, I think we ought to make passing them mandatory for anyone who wants to serve in state government. It’s only fair, since most of our current leaders managed to build careers and get elected without having to pass them when they were students.

David Rask Behling is a rural Albert Lea resident. His column appears Tuesdays.