Chapter III Verse XIV - School Sucks

I hated school, I think on every single level. The teachers, the work, the other children, the schedules, the books; all of it., Years after graduation, I am left with the feeling that school is an extraordinary place to learn about the way our society works but a bad place to learn how to have a fulfilling life.

3 reasons I feel our education system sucks:

Relevance, anyone?
Much of what we learn in school is not what we need to know. People and animals are alike in the way we approach learning. We all learn what we need to know, when we have to know it. If we do it a lot we get better at it. But in our schools, we teach things that make us better workers but not better people.

Many of us have, at best, a limited awareness and understanding of our country's legal, political or economic structures. These three areas shape much of our lives and their quality. Even though most of us will spend our lives suffering because of our limited understanding of such basic tools of society, we fail to prioritize their study. The suspicious side of me wanders if the curriculum is kept bare of concepts that will teach us to demand better laws, leaders and public service. But maybe it's just easier to stick with theories about triangles than explain why our country takes years to hold a trial.

F for Failure
Another problem is the way we measure results. It is difficult to define intelligence. A definition from wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn explained it as: "the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience". I like that but it leads to the question: How does a teacher know that a student understands what is being taught and will use it to enrich their lives? Most of the time they can't know.

Figuring out if a child will use the math they learned to work out the interest payments of a 30-year mortgage is impossible. So we test them. This tidy solution makes everything more digestible. "Read this information, write it down and in a few days or weeks, I'll ask you to give it back to me in the same form I gave it to you." But in many cases it makes it too tidy. It puts our focus on memorization and away from learning to learn. Worse, it needs consistency to work. You can't tell a child that his drawing is more beautiful than another child's since beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But you can tell a child that they got a B on his drawing because they did not stay in the lines. The problem is, all you have taught them is to stay in the lines, not to use his drawing to communicate.

Kids don't like it
Most children do not enjoy going to school. This is acceptable and even expected because many of us are sure that anything that's good for us has to feel bad. But why do so many kids dislike school? Probably because it's just like real life with less free will. For seven hours a day someone else tells them how they are wrong, most of what they do is for an otherwise meaningless prize (a good grade) and everything about the environment reminds them of their subordinance to people who aren't clear about their goals. While most children can learn a video game well enough to play within a few hours, school is a boring place where even the most miraculous knowledge is presented in predictable, often self-serving ways with little connection to the child's present life.

"A child is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lit," -Plutarch.


- Dsus Pays