When children do like school, it’s usually because of the friends they meet there, not because of the lessons.Read more at location 1249
Not long ago I read the book Why Don’t Students Like School? by cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham. The book had received rave reviews from people involved in the school system, but I found that it fails to answer the question posed by its title. Willingham’s thesis is that students don’t like school (and also don’t learn much there) because teachers don’t have a full understanding of certain cognitive principles and therefore don’t teach as well as they could. They don’t present material in ways that appeal best to students’ minds.Read more at location 1254
Children don’t like school because to them school is—dare I say it—prison. Children don’t like school because, like all human beings, they crave freedom,Read more at location 1262
In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply.Read more at location 1273
It is against the law in this and other democratic countries to force someone to work at a job where the person doesn’t want to work, or to marry someone he or she doesn’t want to marry. In contrast, it is against the law to not force a child to go to school if you are the parent and the child doesn’t want to go.Read more at location 1279
Given the historical origins of our schools, described in the last chapter, it should be no surprise that this is the case. To the Protestant reformers who started them, schools were meant to be correctional institutions,Read more at location 1284
Another term that I think deserves to be said aloud is forced education. Like the term prison, this term sounds harsh. But again, if we have compulsory education, we have forced education. The term compulsory, if it has any meaning at all, means that the person has no choice about it.Read more at location 1289
I present abundant evidence that children learn beautifully, on their own motivation and in their own ways,Read more at location 1294
A basic premise of our democratic system of values is that it is wrong to deny anyone liberty without just cause and due process. To incarcerate an adult, we must prove, in a court of law, that the person has committed a crime or is a serious threat to self or others.Read more at location 1297
Sin 2: Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.Read more at location 1302
be diagnosed today as ADHD). He then began systematically educating himself.Read more at location 1307
practice of children’s assuming adult-like responsibilities was not exceptional in the early to mid-nineteenth century, before the era of state-enforced compulsory schooling. Today the typical twelve-year-old in a middle-class suburb is not trusted to babysit or even walk home from school unaccompanied by an adult.Read more at location 1309
The belief that children and even teenagers are incapable of rational decision-making and self-direction is a self-fulfilling prophecy. By confining children to school and other adult-directed school-like settings, and by filling their time with forced busywork, which serves no productive purpose, we deprive them of the time and opportunities they need to practice self-direction and responsibility.Read more at location 1313
An implicit and sometimes explicit message of our forced schooling system is this: “If you do what you are told to do in school, everything will work out well for you.”Read more at location 1318
Mark Twain was fond of saying, “I’ve never let school interfere with my education.”Read more at location 1323
Sin 3: Undermining of intrinsic motivation to learn (turning learning into work).Read more at location 1326
Children come into the world burning to learn. They are naturally curious, naturally playful, and they explore and play in ways that teach them about the social and physical world to which they must adapt.Read more at location 1326
Nature does not turn off this enormous desire and capacity to learn when children turn five or six. We turn it off with our system of schooling.Read more at location 1331
The biggest, most enduring lesson of school is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible, not joyful play as children would otherwise believe.Read more at location 1332
Albert Einstein, who loved to play with math but hated studying it in school, is one of many great thinkers who has pointed out the deleterious effects of forced instruction.Read more at location 1337
It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.Read more at location 1340
When students are evaluated for their learning and are compared with other students, as they constantly are in school, learning becomes not only work but a source of anxiety.Read more at location 1347
A fundamental psychological principle (discussed in Chapter 7) is that anxiety inhibits learning. Learning occurs best in a playful state of mind, and anxiety inhibits playfulness.Read more at location 1351
Sin 4: Judging students in ways that foster shame, hubris, cynicism, and cheating.Read more at location 1353
It is not easy to force people to do what they do not want to do. At first, the cane was the most common instrument of coercion in schools. Another early method was public shaming.Read more at location 1354
We rely now primarily on a system of incessant testing, grading, and ranking of children to motivate them to do their schoolwork. Children are made to feel ashamed (inferior) if they perform worse than their peers and proud (superior) if they perform better. Shame leads some to drop out, psychologically, from the educational endeavorRead more at location 1358
Students are constantly told about the value of high grades. Advancement through the system and eventual freedom from it depend on them. Students understandably become convinced that high grades are the be-all and end-all of their schoolwork. By the time they are eleven or twelve years old, most are realistically cynical about the idea that school is fundamentally a place for learning. They realize that much of what they are required to do is senseless and that they will forget most of what they are tested on shortly after the test.Read more at location 1364
Students understand that the rules distinguishing cheating from not cheating in school are like the rules of a game. But it’s a game they did not choose to play.Read more at location 1373
On anonymous questionnaires, approximately 95 percent of students admit to some degree of cheating, and roughly 70 percent admit to repeated acts of the most blatant forms of cheating, such as copying whole tests from other students or plagiarizing whole papers.Read more at location 1376
Teachers often say that if you cheat in school you are only cheating yourself, because you are shortchanging your own education. But that argument holds water only if what you would have learned by not cheating outweighs the value of whatever you did with the time saved by cheating.Read more at location 1390
In other respects, cheating to get high grades seems to many students to be a win-win-win situation. They want to get high grades, their parents want them to get high grades, and their teachers want them to get high grades.Read more at location 1400
Sin 5: Interference with the development of cooperation and promotion of bullying.Read more at location 1411
By design, it teaches selfishness. The forced competitiveness, the constant grading and ranking of students, contain the implicit lesson that each student’s job is to look out for himself or herself and to do better than others. Indeed, too much help given by one student to another is cheating. Helping others may even hurt the helper, by raising the grading curve and lowering the helper’s position on it.Read more at location 1413
Under normal conditions, children develop their abilities to cooperate and help one another in free, self-directed, social play, where they learn to resolve their differences and take into account one another’s needs in order to keep the game going (see Chapter 8). Age-mixed play is especially valuable in this regard. Researchers have found that the presence of younger children naturally activates the nurturing instincts of older children (discussed in Chapter 9). Older children help younger ones when they play together,Read more at location 1419
The age-segregated, competitive atmosphere of school, along with students’ lack of any real voice in school governance, provides the ideal conditions for the generation of competitive coalitions, or cliques, which provide a foundation for bullying. Children who are not accepted into any of the prevailing cliques may be picked on mercilessly, and they have no way to escape.Read more at location 1428
These bullies are among the popular kids—the athletes, cheerleaders, preppies. They are popular not only with the other kids but also with the teachers, school administrators, and adultsRead more at location 1436
Every once in a while, however, in a particularly vulnerable person, the despair or rage or both erupt into violence, either against the self or against the whole school, and only then does school bullying become an issue to the larger community.Read more at location 1443
Kids at school called her fat, threw things at her and pushed her around. They ridiculed her with rumors that she stuffed tissues in her bra. She attempted suicide and her parents admitted her to an inpatient mental hospital program and sought counseling but said it didn’t help. After missing fifty-three out of the required one hundred and eighty days of school, she was told that she would have to return to school or appear before a truancy board which could then send her to a juvenile detention center. She decided the better alternative was to go into her bedroom and hang herself with a belt. . . . In times past, she could have just dropped out of school, but now kids like her are trapped by compulsory education.Read more at location 1447
Bullying occurs in all institutions where people who have no political power and are ruled in top-down fashion are required by law or economic necessity to remain in that setting. It occurs regularly, for example, in adult as well as juvenile prisons.Read more at location 1459
In their acclaimed book, Will the Boat Sink the Water?, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntau describe the prevalence of bullying in rural China. The peasants are not allowed to move off the land and they are governed, top down, by petty bureaucrats.Read more at location 1461
They learn that their job in school is to get high marks on tests and that critical thinking interferes. To get a good grade, you need to figure out what the teacher wants you to sayRead more at location 1470
To think critically, people must feel motivated and free to voice their own ideas and raise their own questions. But in school students learn that their own ideas and questions don’t count. What counts are their abilities to provide the “correct” answersRead more at location 1477
“I appreciate what you are trying to do, but I don’t need or want to know why the method works! All I need to know is how to follow the steps that the teacher wants and get the answers that she wants.”Read more at location 1483
Students recognize that it would be impossible to delve deeply into their school subjects, even if they wanted to. Time does not permit it.Read more at location 1486
Another great inhibitor of critical thinking in school is anxiety. The continuous evaluation of students that occurs in school reduces critical thinking not only because it leads students to look for what the teacher wants, but also because it promotes anxiety.Read more at location 1490
By forcing all schoolchildren through the same standard curriculum, we reduce their opportunities to follow alternative pathways. The school curriculum represents a tiny subset of the skills and knowledge that are important to our society.Read more at location 1496
In the real world, outside of school, diversity in personality as well as in knowledge is valued. Part of the task of growing up is to find niches that best fit one’s personality.Read more at location 1503
In the modern school classroom, however, there is only one niche, and those whose personalities don’t fit are seen as failures, or as suffering from a “mental disorder.” Instead of adjusting to the diversity of personalities, schools try to mold personalities to fit the school, often with drugs. The most obvious current example of this concerns the high rate of diagnosis of ADHD (attention-deficit/hyper activity disorder) among schoolchildren today.Read more at location 1504
Some children are naturally more active and impulsive than others, and this gets them into trouble in school. It is even harder for them than for the typical child to sit still for hours every day, to attend to assignments that don’t interest them, and to tolerate tedium. In today’s world of high-pressure schooling, those kids get labeled as having a mental disorder, ADHD.Read more at location 1508
When I was in elementary school, decades ago, the adults seemed to recognize that it is not natural for children to spend long hours sitting and studying. We had a half-hour morning recess, an hour of outdoor play at lunch, and another half-hour afternoon recess, and we almost never had homework.Read more at location 1516
Not long ago, I solicited reports from parents who had withdrawn a child from public school and begun homeschooling sometime after the child was diagnosed with ADHD. In the great majority of cases, according to the reports, the children were taken off the drugs and had no particular problems learning under the conditions of homeschooling.Read more at location 1526
One teacher, in response to an early sketch of this chapter, wrote, “I don’t choose what I teach; the state does. Teachers know wonderful things about how children learn, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it. . . . My ability to keep my job is based on how many of my students pass the [state-mandated] test.” But teachers, unlike students, are free to quit.Read more at location 1536
I should add interference with family life as an eighth sin. Schooling eats into the time that families can spend together, on their own activities. It also interferes with family harmony, as parents must be enforcers of homework, cope with the negative effects that schooling has on children’s moods and home behavior, and in some cases do battle with their kids every day to get them to go to school.Read more at location 1546
