In my recent post, Everybody Hates School, I stated that:

…we are asking the wrong question. We know why students hate school – it’s boring, it’s useless, it’s bureaucratic, and it’s as well organized as a drunken mob fighting over the last hotdog at a ballgame. And that’s only the beginning. But what is the right question, you ask?

Why is it ok to hate school?

I went on to list the twenty principal problems (nice pun, eh?) with contemporary education – curriculum, creativity, religion, evaluation, tradition, teacher training, age, timing, technology, marks, textbooks, classrooms, subjects, punishment, innocence, bureaucracy, government, unions, administration, and substituting. My plan was to talk about these in groups of five. And I still shall do so. But I’m going to split them up into individual posts every few days, rather than burden you with all five at a time.

Curriculum.

I know what you’re thinking. Standardization is good. Learning is good. Books are good. Bulk purchasing is good. So what’s wrong with curriculum? Curriculum is the closest thing in contemporary government to mob rule. I shall take for granted that most of you don’t know how curriculum is developed and explain it in brief.

A group of government functionaries (see government in part 4), educational theorists (see teacher training in part 2), and teachers who want to spend time in a boardroom rather than a classroom (see substituting in part 4), get together and spend vast amounts of time discussing what we can’t teach our students.

I know, the theory is that they get together and talk about what we should teach. And they do that. Right at the beginning. They ask the question, what do students need to know? and receive answers that have not already been filtered out by the sheer lack of representation of good information in the room. That takes a few hours. The remainder of the time is spent discussing what parts of that we can’t teach, we don’t have time to teach, we don’t know how to teach, or faith (see religion in this part) won’t let us teach.

So far, we have determined that curriculum development is a waste of time. But most things in society and all things in government can easily be classified as that. So what’s the problem? As I said, so far. At this point, there isn’t one.

Then they make it mandatory. Problem.

We, as teachers, are told by our passion for teaching that our job is to help the students in the best way possible to learn, to grow, and to think. We are told by our curriculum that this is not only impossible but prohibited. And, since we are employed by the very organization who creates this curriculum, we (yes, I included) teach what we are instructed to teach and let students down, not one at a time but by the hundreds.

What could be so wrong with the curriculum, you ask? Three things – mediocrity, modifications, and segregation. We’re going to talk about these three things in depth in other sections but there’s no reason not to begin now.

Mediocrity is the most massive problem with schools. We expect less from students now than ever before. And they continue to disappoint us. Every time we lower the bar, the students find a new way to walk straight into it and hit their heads. We need to stop lowering the bar. We need to get out of this painfully archaic way of thinking that we tailor our teaching to what the student is capable of (theoretically speaking, this is a concept from the early part of the last century called the Zone of Proximal Development) and raise our expectations. Not a little. Or gradually. Expect nothing short of what we think of as genius and students will not only perform but ask for more.

You’re skeptical, I know. You don’t think you could have performed at exceptional levels when you were in school. There are several reasons that you think that. One is that what you consider normal is no longer what is expected of students. What you were required to do in third grade is likely what is now expected in the sixth and so forth. Don’t believe me? In some regions, ninth-grade textbooks are now being used in twelfth grade. The same answers now receive higher marks on the SATs. Standardized tests have been renormed across North America because average results were so poor that it didn’t justify education funding.

Another reason is that you were raised in an era where the expectation was low and you didn’t have to work to achieve it. Who knows what you could have done if you had applied yourself at age 8? Don’t sell yourself so short to think that you achieved your potential at every step of the way. I assure you that you didn’t even come close.

Where is my proof? The Internet. Who is better at using a computer – you or your six-year-old? She’s managed to achieve more in the last year understanding technology than you have in the last ten. Don’t tell me that children are stupid. I tell you that they are underachieving because they are expected to be mediocre. And, as they would achieve what we ask of them if it were difficult, they achieve exactly what we expect of them now. Sad, isn’t it?

Modifications are another staggering area of curriculum development. By this, I don’t mean exceptionality, which is a whole other topic about which we shall have much to say in the future. I mean, how difficult is it to change the curriculum? In theory, theory is exactly what drives curriculum development. In practice, curriculum is exactly the same as it has been for decades. Sure, we put different names on it. And we talk about groupwork more now than ever before. But teachers figured out groupwork a long time ago. And the use of technology in the classroom. And student leadership. And teaching to individuals rather than to norms. And how long has it taken for any of these things to be adopted in the government documentation? Simply, they still haven’t made it in there in anything but name. And they won’t because change is an admission of guilt that it wasn’t already working. And we can’t have that.

Teachers are asked to teach to the students but strapped into a straightjacket of rigid curriculum outcomes and methods. So what comes first? The student or our jobs? I’ll leave that to you to figure out and I assure you it’s not the first.

Segregation used to mean different races having different water fountains. And I suppose, in a way, that’s what I mean, too. The maths don’t mix with the musics. The Englishes don’t even contemplate talking to the sciences. Curriculum talks about subjects as if they existed in small black boxes, rather than as an ocean with seas of understanding flowing freely into each other. And that’s wrong.

We’re going to talk about this in much more depth in part 3 but I’ll give a brief of it here. There is no boundary between history and English, between math and music, between physics and geography. We made it up to make things easier. And because teachers don’t want to teach everything. Which they should be doing. Some primary educators have got the right idea, creating projects that span the gaps between traditional subject areas, using math to build models in art class, writing English assignments on topics from biology. The educated person is not an expert in one thing and mindlessly unaware of all others. We mark separately, we teach separately, and we treat subjects as if they had nothing in common but the building in which we sit. Wrong is only the beginning.

So what’s the solution to this one? Throw out the curriculum?

That’s too simple. That being said, however, it’s a start.

I get it. It’s not as if it were some sort of dark secret. The loathing that the general public has for education would be legendary were it not so ubiquitous. Not only do I see it, I understand it. I, as are you, am a product in many ways of the public education system. Hundreds of research hours are spent every year determining why students don’t want to go to school – thousands more theorizing possible solutions, all of which are in conflict, not only with each other but with themselves. And then nothing changes.

But we are asking the wrong question. We know why students hate school – it’s boring, it’s useless, it’s bureaucratic, and it’s as well organized as a drunken mob fighting over the last hotdog at a ballgame. And that’s only the beginning. But what is the right question, you ask?

Why is it ok to hate school?

I know what you’re going to say. It’s not ok. You reprimand little Ferdinand every time he says school sucks and Anastasia is summarily grounded when instead of writing her homework she simply writes vulgarities on the paper to be submitted. But ask yourself if this is pro forma or for real? You hated school so it must be natural that your kids do. So you feel a little pang of guilt every time you say that school is good for you. You know that vegetables make you healthy so ensuring that the overcooked green peas make it into Frederica’s mouth rather than her pockets is your duty as a parent. But school was a waste of time and you can’t bring yourself to think otherwise, regardless of the hours of effort that you must put into the task.

If you think it’s ok to hate school, then, there must be others who think like you. The people who had similar experiences to you, I would expect. Like your friends. And classmates. And their friends and classmates. Oh my. That covers just about everyone, doesn’t it?

So we all think it’s ok to hate school and then we wonder why students go on the pip and feel justified in so doing. If we’re going to spend innumerable hours seeking educational solutions, perhaps we should begin our search from a place of truth rather than fiction. Just a thought.

I assure you, this has not been a pointless rant; neither was the point to spread depression and lethargy. We shall discuss twenty serious issues with education and potential solutions to them. Before we begin, I should point out that I have not said issues with public education. If you noticed the omission, I applaud your sense of the status quo. This is not a discussion of issues with the oft-maligned state education system. Private educators are just as guilty, often more so. I simply ask that you keep this in mind as you read further.

We’re going to tackle five of these at a time.

Part 1 – What’s in a school?

• curriculum – When you see a train coming, it might be best to step off the track.
• creativity – When we tell students to be themselves, perhaps we should actually mean it.
• religion – The infidel is smarter than you are.
• evaluation – We’re testing the wrong thing.
• tradition – Yesterday’s methods didn’t even work yesterday.

Part 2 – How do we do it?

• teacher training – Who needs a class on chalkboard writing, anyway?
• age – Five-year-olds aren’t stupid. At least, not all of them.
• timing – It’s not just half of us who hate periods.
• technology – Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s good. Or bad, come to think of it.
• marks – What’s the difference between an 80% and an 81%?

Part 3 – Think inside the box?

• textbooks – If you write well, it’s a best-selling novel. If you don’t, it’s a textbook.
• classrooms – Chalkboards and tables and desks. Oh my.
• subjects – Why is writing a story and writing about the Great War different?
• punishment – What did you learn in detention today?
• innocence – Your students probably have more sex than you do.

Part 4 – Where is the box, anyway?

• bureaucracy – Red tape is an ineffective teaching tool.
• government – What do politicians know about teaching, anyway?
• unions – There exists a fuzzy world where mediocrity is rewarded if you keep at it long enough.
• administration – When was the last time you were sent to the principal’s office because you were good?
• substituting – Random never solved anything.

I shan’t bore you with the details at the moment, since I believe that you have enough to keep your thoughts busy for a short while. More soon.