Like spinach or broccoli that are simply supposed to be good for you a priori, kids are supposed to stomach a dozen or more years of schooling in the United States. Maybe you can force a kid to stomach, spinach, broccoli, or even castor oil, but learning is different. This is why the phrase, "I hate school," is so often evidenced—either by words or actions. But, consider this. An untrained substitute teacher recently was placed in a poor, failing, fourth grade Philadelphia classroom. He abolished the textbooks—locked them all up in the closet, in fact—abolished the quizzes, and just had the kids hang on to their pencils and paper. Each day he brought in copies of two local newspapers. He read stories of interest out loud, or had the class read them in unison. He talked about these events and gradually got the kids interested in what was going on in their city, the nation, and the world. They became so interested, in fact, that the students asked to write letters to people such as sports heroes, (after calculating season and game averages), or to politicians whom they felt were avoiding critical issues. The teacher went over the letters with before they were mailed. (The students didn't want to embarrass themselves by poor grammar or spelling, especially in front of their heroes.) Students who needed to go the bathroom just excused themselves and left—just like in the real world. By the end of the school year these "deprived" children were performing above grade level in reading, writing, and arithmetic (as determined by national norms, not district-slanted standards). A more typical classroom experience for "aptitude challenged" kids is to be bored and confused, and possibly even humiliated and angered until they aren't forced to attend school any more. These students hate school, and probably for good reason. As I said in a previous column, I have probably forgotten 85 percent of what I learned—was forced to learn—in my 15 or so years in school. Those were important years at impressionable periods of my life, and they should have been put to better use than doing such things as memorizing the major crops, exports, land areas, etc., of all of the major countries of the world. Even if I remembered such things at this point, the information would be out of date, and I would still would have to rely on an encyclopedia or the Internet for up-to-date information. We know that such things as creativity are inversely related to years of schooling. I remember a complex story problem in math I was once assigned in grade school. My answer was counted wrong, not because the answer was wrong, but because I didn't solve the problem in the "correct" way. You had to show your work, and as far as the teacher was concerned there was only one way to solve the problem—her way. Although I thought my way was easier—I tend to work hard at trying to find easier ways of doing things—I was forced to conclude that you couldn't try anything new and different. (If you notice a certain lack of creativity in these columns, now you know why!) Research shows that the most creative kids are the most apt to drop out of school. Research also shows that the longer young people stay in school the less creative they tend to be. If you are around young people very long you quickly determine that their world is rather different from ours. But it is their world that they will progress through as they develop—not ours. At the same time we tend to insist that young people meet us in our world and accept our beliefs about things. In fact we get rather upset if they don't. If we were living in a state of perfection we might be justified in insisting on this—at least until something changed in the world. How do you fix some of the problems that cause kids to hate school? In an earlier column I discussed numerous curricular changes that would represent a good start—but a start that in large measure would be opposed by most of the old guard in education. And, of course, this goes a long way toward explaining why many kids hate school. This column talks about the six-million disillusioned and disenfranchised youth in the United States. |
