I am considered to be one of the best students at a supposedly excellent United States public high school, so it will surprise some that I can say, honestly and without caveat, I hate school.
And let me make it more surprising with some clarification: I don’t hate school the way one “hates” mowing the lawn or filing taxes. I don’t intend some cheeky rant about the little discomforts of a necessary evil. I hate school because I feel it has stolen from me an otherwise fantastic eleven years of life and because it is in the process of stealing a twelfth. I regard time spent in school as worse than wasted. I regret that I have not taken drastic action to free myself of it, and I regret that I will not soon muster the courage to do so.
Let me say to any skeptical adults who look back kindly on their school days that school is probably not as you remember it. It is not prom and inside jokes and making out in crowded hallways. Fun little social forays may constitute the better half of what students will clearly remember, but they are a negligible fraction of what students actually experience. An enormous majority of school time is devoted to curriculum—after all, education is the main stated goal of schooling—and this means essays, assignments, and assessments. Anyone who chooses to view school in a light that does not first consider the assigned work is deceiving himself.
So what is the assigned work like? It’s painfully tedious, like most work that must be assigned. But this would not be a serious problem if it were necessary for students’ development. Unfortunately, it’s not necessary, and it’s rarely even beneficial.
Terrifyingly, it is not a radical thing to say that one soon forgets most of what one learns in school and that the information one does retain is pathetically trivial. But even this fails to adequately capture the absurdity of the curriculum. Even were the knowledge being retained in full, whole subjects—like math, science, foreign language, and history—would be effectively worthless to large sectors of the population.
Ask linguists how frequently they rely on stored knowledge of chemistry, and you will learn a host of new words for zero. Every now and then, quick recollection of academic information may prove useful in unrelated professions, but those little utilities rarely justify two hours of study, let alone thousands.
Many advocates of the major school subjects know it’s hopeless to claim that a majority of students actually benefit from possessing the knowledge, so they declare that the information is not the goal. In an impressive work of rationalization, they claim that being forced to exercise the skills necessary for the subjects is the real benefit.
They say that when you sit in math class memorizing and applying formulas, you won’t need the formulas again, but you’re learning important problem solving skills without even realizing it.
I, for one, don’t take well to being told that I need years of study in topics unrelated to my goals in order to develop skills that are invisible and unmeasurable, that I would be practicing anyway in endeavors of my choice, and that I feel I already possess. It is a flimsy, authoritarian, and criminally unfalsifiable attack on my free time, and it riles me every time I hear it.
So what school claims to teach is unimportant, and it fails to teach it in a lasting way. Remarkably, school commits another educational sin, one more damning than either of these: It doesn’t offer its pupils a chance to prove their proficiency before it goes spouting its mandatory education.
There are posters mounted throughout my school that list questions our teachers are supposed to ask themselves about their lessons. One of the questions is this: “What will I do if the student already learned it?” I have yet to hear a teacher’s answer, but my guess is it doesn’t involve altering the compulsory schooling laws to set the student free. More likely, it involves giving him an option to study more advanced content during class time. Maybe it even involves recommending him for transfer to a more difficult version of the class.
But take the case of a child who, like many of my friends, can write better than the average adult. Should he be made to choose between an unchallenging English class and an advanced English class, the latter of which is only challenging to him because it demands double the busywork and exhaustively explores minutiae? Of course not. He is already at least as skillful a writer as he needs to be. He should be given the option to do what most every adult has done and cease formally studying English.
The reality is that proficiency can get you shuffled from class to class, but there is no level you can reach after which you’re free to go your own way. When I was in seventh grade, my ACT score—that most revered measure of academic knowledge and ability—exceeded that of my district’s average twelfth grader by five points, and no one took me seriously when I asked to leave. Five years and countless hours of schooling later, I’m still asking to leave, and still no one cares. Make no mistake: the only number that will free you is your age. Forget test scores. Forget proficiency. Forget intellect. You will not shave a day off your term without living it.
Our education system can seem a joke at times. We eagerly release incapable people whom we deem old enough—because only a terrible dystopia would forcibly educate innocent and unwilling adults—but we do not release proficient people who happen to be young. What highly educated individual decided that age matters more than learnedness in the context of education? I can name only one other institution where time spent is valued absolutely and achievement is wholly disregarded. It’s a place for hardened criminals rather than innocent children. But I digress.
Study in school is boring and virtually useless, and it bears an opportunity cost measured in years of youthful life. This post has identified the major educational shortcomings of school, but space insists I save for other posts the—I think larger—problem of its violations of basic human dignity. School fails us on so many fronts, and in the face of it all, it has the gall to demand attendance under threat of severe legal penalty. A business that had to force customers through its doors would evoke immediate suspicion, and I think it’s time we held school to the same standard.
Nevertheless, people contrive ways to appreciate it. Some cheerfully admit that our compulsory education system fails to meaningfully educate—that it fails to fulfill its only intended purpose—and still defend it. They defend it from a place of intellectual honesty, they defend it because it’s the conventional thing to do, or they defend it because they can’t stand to admit they’ve wasted time. For whatever reason, there will always be those who find it a shocking contradiction that an intelligent student should hate school, but I don’t see how an intelligent person can feel any other way.
Written: 11/27/2015
Absolutely brilliant. Mind if I repost this on my site?
Go for it!