Unfortunately our schools have taken a distinctively communist bent in teaching methodology as well as ideologically.
Posted on 06/08/2011 9:23:48 AM PDT by MegaSilver
Children don't like school because they love freedom.
Someone recently referred me to a book that they thought I'd like. It's a 2009 book, aimed toward teachers of grades K through 12, titled Why Don't Students Like School? It's by a cognitive scientist named Daniel T. Willingham, and it has received rave reviews by countless people involved in the school system. Google the title and author and you'll find pages and pages of doting reviews and nobody pointing out that the book totally and utterly fails to answer the question posed by its title.
Willingham's thesis is that students don't like school because their teachers don't have a full understanding of certain cognitive principles and therefore don't teach as well as they could. They don't present material in ways that appeal best to students' minds. Presumably, if teachers followed Willingham's advice and used the latest information cognitive science has to offer about how the mind works, students would love school.
Talk about avoiding the elephant in the room!
Ask any schoolchild why they don't like school and they'll tell you. "School is prison." They may not use those words, because they're too polite, or maybe they've already been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can't be prison. But decipher their words and the translation generally is, "School is prison."
Let me say that a few more times: School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison.
Willingham surely knows that school is prison. He can't help but know it; everyone knows it. But here he writes a whole book entitled "Why Don't Students Like School," and not once does he suggest that just possibly they don't like school because they like freedom, and in school they are not free.
I shouldn't be too harsh on Willingham. He's not the only one avoiding this particular elephant in the room. Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody says it. It's not polite to say it. We all tiptoe around this truth, that school is prison, because telling the truth makes us all seem so mean. How could all these nice people be sending their children to prison for a good share of the first 18 years of their lives? How could our democratic government, which is founded on principles of freedom and self-determination, make laws requiring children and adolescents to spend a good portion of their days in prison? It's unthinkable, and so we try hard to avoid thinking it. Or, if we think it, we at least don't say it. When we talk about what's wrong with schools we pretend not to see the elephant, and we talk instead about some of the dander that's gathered around the elephant's periphery.
But I think it is time that we say it out loud. School is prison.
If you think school is not prison, please explain the difference.
The only difference I can think of is that to get into prison you have to commit a crime, but they put you in school just because of your age. In other respects school and prison are the same. In both places you are stripped of your freedom and dignity. You are told exactly what you must do, and you are punished for failing to comply. Actually, in school you must spend more time doing exactly what you are told to do than is true in adult prisons, so in that sense school is worse than prison.
At some level of their consciousness, everyone who has ever been to school knows that it is prison. How could they not know? But people rationalize it by saying (not usually in these words) that children need this particular kind of prison and may even like it if the prison is run well. If children don't like school, according to this rationalization, it's not because school is prison, but is because the wardens are not kind enough, or amusing enough, or smart enough to keep the children's minds occupied appropriately.
But anyone who knows anything about children and who allows himself or herself to think honestly should be able to see through this rationalization. Children, like all human beings, crave freedom. They hate to have their freedom restricted. To a large extent they use their freedom precisely to educate themselves. They are biologically prepared to do that. That's what many of my previous posts have been about (for an overview, see my July 16, 2008, post). Children explore and play, freely, in ways designed to learn about the physical and social world in which they are developing. In school they are told they must stop following their interests and, instead, do just what the teacher is telling them they must do. That is why they don't like school.
As a society we could, perhaps, rationalize forcing children to go to school if we could prove that they need this particular kind of prison in order to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to become good citizens, to be happy in adulthood, and to get good jobs. Many people, perhaps most people, think this has been proven, because the educational establishment talks about it as if it has. But, in truth, it has not been proven at all.
In fact, for decades, families who have chosen to "unschool" their children, or to send them to the Sudbury Valley School (which is, essentially, an "unschool" school) have been proving the opposite (see, for example, my August 13, 2008, post). Children who are provided the tools for learning, including access to a wide range of other people from whom to learn, learn what they need to know--and much more--through their own self-directed play and exploration. There is no evidence at all that children who are sent to prison come out better than those who are provided the tools and allowed to use them freely. How, then, can we continue to rationalize sending children to prison?
I think the educational establishment deliberately avoids looking honestly at the experiences of unschoolers and Sudbury Valley because they are afraid of what they will find. If school as prison isn't necessary, then what becomes of this whole huge enterprise, which employs so many and is so fully embedded in the culture (see my posts on Why Schools Are What they Are)?
Willingham's book is in a long tradition of attempts to bring the "latest findings" of psychology to bear on issues of education. All of those efforts have avoided the elephant and focused instead on trying to clean up the dander. But as long as the elephant is there, the dander just keeps piling up.
In a future post I'll talk about some of the history of psychology's failed attempts to improve education. Every new generation of parents, and every new batch of fresh and eager teachers, hears or reads about some "new theory" or "new findings" from psychology that, at long last, will make schools more fun and improve learning. But none of it has worked. And none of it will until people face the truth: Children hate school because in school they are not free. Joyful learning requires freedom.
I thought this might strike a chord with a lot of folks here.
I know a young lad who was in day care from age 2 and a half to 4, then in preschool, then in public school from Kindergarten through 3rd grade. He loved kindergarten and got on very well with several of his teachers but still HATED to be in school and relished every day off. At age nine he would still cry when Christmas Vacation ended. He always regarded school as indenturement. He loved doing un-educational things at home (video games and lame movies especially), mostly because he associated anything "educational" with imprisonment.
The funny thing was that this was an incredibly intelligent and intellectually interested child: his IQ tested at above 130. From fourth grade onwards he was home schooled but continued to hate all his schoolwork. He went back to high school in 9th grade and enjoyed it moderately but resented the high load of schoolwork. Nevertheless, he became valedictorian because he knew deep down that he was capable of doing so and that to do otherwise would close doors that didn't need to be closed to him.
It was not until he was 18 that he finally managed to psychologically separate scholarly learning from indenturement. When he did, the results--the improvement in his character and his overall attractiveness as a person--were apparent almost immediately. He's 26 today: if you talked to him from scratch you would think he had always been a brilliant dilettante who loved learning and loved school; it is not until you get to know him and hear a bit about his personal story that you'll find out how little self-confidence he has.
All this is not the only reason; there were also significant familial and confessional rides in his life, but few were so dramatic as the jolting rides from too much schooling, too early on. In one sense it really ruined his childhood.
They hate school because at times they are forced to do things they don’t particularly want to do. Sort of like the rest of life.
These days teachers do not teach anything useful, let alone teach.
Had one math teacher tell us, “Well, most of you saw polynomials in the New Windsor school district already so I don’t over it.”
None of us were fom the New Windsor school district.
“so I don’t have to go over it.”
Typo alert, check your keyboards...
Most high school students who hate it are too stupid to benefit from HS-level education.
End free school at 8th grade and give vouchers for HS - with an entrance exam.
Almost all school problems would disappear.
It’s because the “Modern” Public School System was set up by Horance Mann and John Dewey in the late 19th and Early/Mid 20th Century after they had looked at the “Education” System in Germany during Bismark. The German System and Prison were kinda similer. Oh Bismarkian Germany is where T. Roosevelt, W. Wilson and FDR got alot of their BAD “Progressive” Ideas from.
Ya wanna talk about “Prison?” I went 2 a boarding skool. Gotta grate ejamacation , tho,,,,,
After a certain point, school becomes useless and repetitive. I think many students would benefit from early graduations followed by further learning in fields of their own choosing.
If we had the internet when I was a kid, I would have begged to be home schooled.
Yeah, both authors missed the point. Nobody likes anyplace they HAVE to go. Even if you love your job at some point in the morning preparations you don’t want to go, because you have to. We could turn schools into the most entertaining and rewarding building on the planet, as long as kids have to go they’ll hate it.
Many teachers these days are useless in and of themselves.
Others are restricted by what they are allowed to teach, the curriculum sucks, or the teachers are trying to horndog the students.
I really feel sorry for students these days.
In Vernon NJ they still taught American history.
I moved to New York and found that they taught primarily Chinese and European history in preference to American history.
Nobody knew about Mr. David Bushnell’s “Turtle” for example.
Or too smart.
By the time I was a senior, I had taken everything that there was to take in HS - with one exception, AP English (which I enjoyed, had a great teacher, tested out of 12 college English credits thanks to her).
Last semester of my senior year, I had 3 studyhalls a day. Spent most of the time screwing around and sneaking off campus to buy cigarettes. Ironic thing is, the powers that be at the school wouldn't let me go to a local community college to take, say calculus or something that would have beneficial, because I "wasn't allowed to leave school grounds."
“We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.”
Ummm, not all of us.
School is where you learn about delayed gratification. Or don’t learn about it.
I was bored to death with school. I dropped out in my sophomore year and got a GED within a few months. By the time my class graduated I was a foreman in a local factory and ended up with a lot of my former classmates working for me.
That reminds me of a funny cartoon I once saw in “Writer’s Digest.” Fifty students in a classroom: forty-nine are staring at the teacher in rapt attention, while the fiftieth is snoozing away in the back of the class. Says the teacher: “Some day one of you will be a great writer!”
I’m with you — technically, the only thing that kept me from graduating high school after my junior year was the requirement for 4 years of English. I’m sure I could have gotten that waived with an exam or something had I really tried.
However, I did use that final year to my advantage, taking courses I might not other have tried otherwise (music theory, psychology) and advanced (AP level) courses in chemistry, calculus, and physics. As a net result, I started college essentially 1 semester ahead of my incoming class.
School system answer: Do away with the regents exams, that will raise the student scores!
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