I learned quickly how to play and succeed at the game of school. I was fortunate to be an early reader and to come from a supportive, white middle-class family to give me the initial advantage, and then I learned what I needed to do, how I needed to behave, to gain the teacher's affections and get the A.
As so often happens when we reach adulthood, and especially parenthood,
we realize how much we don't know. I realized that I might have been
successfully schooled, but I
didn't feel well educated. When I
reflect on the approximately 15,000 hours I spent in K-12 public school, I
think of what a waste of time most of those hours were. What else could I have
been doing, learning, in those hours? How much more genuine could those hours
have been if I wasn't spending so much time playing the game, but actually
learning, reading, doing?
As Ken Robinson candidly states in his book, Creative Schools: "The success of those who do well in the system comes at a high price for the many who do not. As the standards movement gathers pace, even more students are paying the price of failure. Too often, those who are succeeding are doing so in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it." [1]
For many children, the harm of compulsory schooling is obvious. Many are
at a disadvantage right out of the gate and those disadvantages are amplified
and embedded as their schooling continues. Others are bullied, labeled,
tracked, or medicated. But beyond these obvious harms are the more subtle ones.
Most schooled children, myself included, become conditioned to value and seek
extrinsic rewards and superficial achievements. We lose creativity and
individuality as we conform to arbitrary curriculum demands, teacher
expectations, and institutional mores.
Parker Palmer writes in the Preface to
Kirsten Olson’s book, Wounded By School, about "the hidden and
long-lasting wounds that result from the structural violence inherent in the
ways we organize and evaluate learning, wounds that range from 'I found out
that I have no gift of creativity,' or 'I learned that I'm no good at sports,'
to 'They drained off my self-confidence,' 'I emerged feeling stupid,' or 'They
put me in the losers' line and I've been there ever since.' Equally sad and
profoundly ironic is the wound that may be the most widespread of all: the
eagerness to learn that we all bring into the world as infants is often
diminished and even destroyed by our schooling." [2]
So while it may seem that some of us made it through compulsory
schooling unscathed--and even on top--I believe that few, if any of us, really
do. We don't know how else we might have spent those 15,000 hours: to follow
our curiosities, to reveal our interests, to pursue our passions, to read, and
read, and read some more. We don’t know how well educated we could have become
in our youth if we hadn’t spent so much time memorizing, repeating, forgetting,
and otherwise playing the game of school.
Are you on Twitter? Follow me there @kerry_edu
Are you on Twitter? Follow me there @kerry_edu
[1] Robinson, Kenneth. Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. New York: Penguin Books, 2015, Introduction (xxi-xxii).
[2] Olson, Kirsten. Wounded By School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture. New York: Teachers College Press, 2009, Preface.
Very well stated. This was true for me as well. I learned very well how to do school and succeed at anything that looked like school, not so much everything else (like knowing my own mind, figuring out my interests, and living real life in the real world). It's a big world outside of school, and we do children a disservice making them think that's all there is.
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