School Is a Prison — And Damaging Our Kids

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/education/school-prison-and-damaging-our-kids



Parents send their children to school with the best of intentions, believing that’s what they need to become productive and happy adults. Many have qualms about how well schools are performing, but the conventional wisdom is that these issues can be resolved with more money, better teachers, more challenging curricula and/or more rigorous tests.

But what if the real problem is school itself? The unfortunate fact is that one of our most cherished institutions is, by its very nature, failing our children and our society.

School is a place where children are compelled to be, and where their freedom is greatly restricted — far more restricted than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, we have been compelling our children to spend ever more time in this kind of setting, and there is strong evidence (summarized in my recent book) that this is causing serious psychological damage to many of them. Moreover, the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.

Compulsory schooling has been a fixture of our culture now for several generations. It’s hard today for most people to even imagine how children would learn what they must for success in our culture without it. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are so enamored with schooling that they want even longer school days and school years. Most people assume that the basic design of schools, as we know them today, emerged from scientific evidence about how children learn best. But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

[liberal_at_heart]

1. It doesn't have to be a prison. The main problem with education especially in the last few decades

is that it is designed to provide our businesses with workers. There is much more to learning about our world than just what job you will have when you get out of school. And most disturbing the trend now is that the businesses want to not only profit from the labor once those students are out of school, but now want to profit off of the actual process of educating those students as well. Businesses have privatized our public education system and we need to take it back.

[Recursion]

5. Last few decades? That goes back to Dewey or farther

For that matter, we initially had public education because New England Calvinists believed everyone should be able to read the Bible and realize how damned they are.

[raouldukelives]

15. So true. I don't see any changes on the horizon. At least, good ones.

A few more Texas textbooks and a higher emphasis on sports. Teach em wrong and fill their heads with thoughts of dominating opponents as a way to a more sophisticated and enlightened populous ready to tackle the issues of climate change which they will most surely, horribly and un-preparedly face.

[Democracyinkind]

2. I am 100% in favor of public education.

That said, the origins of the American public school system as we have it today is based on an ideology of industrial control, and not from some kind of republican ( in the good, non-partisan sense) ideology. Just look at who designed the system during the gilded age. "Charitable" my ass.

[Trillo]

16. Article doesn't say "industrial control", rather education systems evolved from "religious control"

or "punishment" and "reward" systems of the Protestant Reformation. That when the state took over and made schools compulsory, the religious components were removed so the schools became secular, but that the basic punishment and reward system of religious force stayed in place, and that the secular, compulsory system did not evolve from scientific findings of what worked best to educate.

Here are relevant paragraphs:

Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn. The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them. The early founders of schools were quite clear about this in their writings. The idea that schools might be places for nurturing critical thought, creativity, self-initiative or ability to learn on one’s own — the kinds of skills most needed for success in today’s economy — was the furthest thing from their minds. To them, willfulness was sinfulness, to be drilled or beaten out of children, not encouraged.

When schools were taken over by the state and made compulsory, and directed toward secular ends, the basic structure and methods of schooling remained unchanged. Subsequent attempts at reform have failed because, though they have tinkered some with the structure, they haven’t altered the basic blueprint. The top-down, teach-and-test method, in which learning is motivated by a system of rewards and punishments rather than by curiosity or by any real, felt desire to know, is well designed for indoctrination and obedience training but not much else. It’s no wonder that many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators either left school early (like Thomas Edison), or said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it (like Albert Einstein).

[Igel]

21. And yet it's modelled more on industry than on church schools.

Nice batches of kids that are processed by groups, evaluated in groups, and issued a "quality certificate" at the end. Lots of industrial regulations and quotas, with quality control checkpoints along the way.

Having all the production follow a set formula and requiring 100% compliance is "big-government regulation of industry" idea. We take kids and sort them; we shape and mould them to fit the die-presses we have for them.

The religious schools in 1500s and 1600s were small and fairly free form. They were strict and imposed control, but that's not unique to religious schools. A lot of their methods were taken over by Big Education, first in the late 1800s but also in the 1920s and 1930s by proletarian-oriented secularists because it's also Big Industry and Big Government ways of doing things. It's handy to point the finger at the religious folk because they're nice scapegoats. Dewey and other "progressive" and "socially aware" thinkers are much, much harder to impugn. It's to them, and not to Luther and his immediate successors, we owe Arnie Duncan.

If you have to deal with 1 000 000 individuals it's hard. If you can divvy them up into a few different categories for assembly-line processing, it's much easier.

[The2ndWheel]

25. No coincidence that people are often refered to as products of the school system

[Democracyinkind]

41. Thank you. You've very eloquently elaborated the point I wanted to make.

[Democracyinkind]

40. I read the article, I beg to differ.

The religious roots of our education system is a different cup of tea (with which I have less of an issue).

The origins of the pulic school system as we know it today lay in the gilded age.

[Trillo]

42. Article says "compulsory schools", "public" does not appear.

I got the distinct impression "compulsory" meant it was about public and private schools.

[Democracyinkind]

45. Let me amend then...

The origins of compulsary schooling in the US lay in the gilded age.

[chervilant]

3. Since its inception, public education

has been intended to "prepare" individuals for their "life's work." Only those of us with "great intellects" are thought to be capable of "great things" -- becoming doctors, lawyers, university professors, or scientists.

Conversely, two-thirds to three-quarters of us are told that we have "average or below average" intellects. We are not told this because it's mathematically demonstrable, or because we've developed strategies for "measuring" IQ. We're told this because there are limited opportunities for exceptional higher education. And, I -- and others like me -- think this is a HUGE psychic wound for our entire species.

For a thought-provoking perspective on public education, view any of a number of TED talks by Sir Ken Robinson. You might start with this one.

[Recursion]

4. Schools are concrete boxes we lock children in

If there's anything more outdated in 2013 than driving children to a big centralized building for training as future industrial peons, it's hard to think of.

[VanillaRhapsody]

26. So the socializing has no positive effect?

they should all be home-schooled?

[tecelote]

6. A well educated population is hard to control.

Plus, who will work for McDonald's? Immigrants?

[ananda]

7. This is not true across the board.

I have worked in some very good schools and know of others.

[tecelote]

8. To me "standardized" is a bad word in education.

We have many great teachers and great schools.

We need to pay them better and let them teach based upon the needs of the children in their classroom.

'Just one more thing that is more important than bombing people.

[Bluenorthwest]

9. This is material the Republican Radicals around here would adore

They say 'Public Schooling is child abuse' and this article says the same thing. Our anti education Republicans also say radiation is good for people.

[DebJ]

12. I agree. n/t

[Jackpine Radical]

10. There have been numerous examples of alternative approaches, many of which

work very well if your goal is to turn out well-rounded humans; the problem is that I think modern schools are almost deliberately designed to cripple kids emotionally and prepare them for life in totalitarian circumsrtances (by which I mean everything from the brutal factories of the early Industrial Age to the soul-robbing grills at McDeathburgers and the stockrooms of your local MallWart).


Examples of schools that work? Good Montessori schools; Waldorf schools; schools based on the principles of A.S. Neilll's Summerhill School. The problem is that products of such schools have an unacceptably low tolerance for bullshit.

[Cryptoad]

11. We want to best Education for our Children

but we are not willing to provide the schema to insure that the best and brightest become the teachers of our children.

[Igel]

22. We say we want the best education for our children.

Then we insist that what matters is devoting as many resources as possible to the bottom 20% of our students.

One teaching methodology is to hold to a schedule. You get through the curriculum, and you try to make sure that everybody learns it. The top 25% have no problem. The middle group struggle and barely pass. The bottom group fails. Response: Devote more resources to the bottom group. This doesn't work, pure and simple.

Another teaching methodology is to teach for half the unit or a bit more and give a test. Find out who's learned it. Those who haven't go back to have another swipe at the "stuff" and those who have move on. Response: It's a lot of work if you have 30 students, 15 "get it" and 15 don't, because you have to separate the class and have two lessons going for half (or so) of each unit. You're also making sure that the lowest group is taught less, and settling for "mastery" of just what's really important. Is that the "best education"? Some parents say no. And the high-achieving kids these days tend to look at the slackers and say, "If I failed that test I could be doing nothing right now and still get an A."

You can combine those two to "just teach what's essential." Then everybody sits there and learns at a low level. The high-achievers' eyes glaze over from boredom. But it's easy on those whose job is being a teacher and not so confusing for the students. It makes for high test scores, if you just have to teach the basics and ignore the standards.

And that's why we have the standards in the first place.

[VanillaRhapsody]

27. Why not just programmed learning?

You learn at your own pace?

[Cryptoad]

31. I have no problem with

resources of the bottom but we must start process to separate students by their cognitive capacities way earlier than after 12 years of Primary education and provide the best separated paths for every student.

[DebJ]

13. Sudbury school has only 155 students, and they screen who goes to the school.

You can't apply that model to educating the masses. Can you imagine the taxpayer burden
for having school buildings every few blocks? Less than 200 students per building?
I'm sure the teacher-student ratio is lower than public schools also. Who is going
to fund that?

Finally, once again, this is a school where the children who attend each come from homes
that value education. I used to hear all the time when I was a child even that the single
most important factor in a child's education is parental interest. Then, no one had the
gumption to mention that factor until Obama ran for President. Not that he's done
much about it. Parental interest needs to be more than this: I gave you my kid
teach now why haven't you made him a genius?

[liberal_at_heart]

30. Some tax burdens are worth it. Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps are all tax burdens. They are

good tax burdens. When I had children I took on many burdens including financial, but they are all worth it. Anytime we agree to take care of one another it is worth it. It is a worthwhile investment with exponential returns.

[DebJ]

47. Please convince Governor Gashole Corbett of Pa of that.

I know a lot of teachers who would be THRILLED right now if they could even get paper.
Try teaching 45 students to a class, 6 classes per day, and you are allowed 200 photocopies
per week........and the text books are horrible.
Forget pencils, pens, crayons, anything at all...
AND your pay is going to be cut 10% per year next year, and again 10% the next year, and again 10% the third year.

And by the way, the 7th graders you are teaching who have brain damage....if they don't pass the state test,
you are a horrible teacher and will be terminated............no thanks for your 28 years of service.

And if a student attacks another student in your class, you will be held responsible, and MAYBE the parents
will be contacted, and the students will NOT be removed from your classroom, no matter what they have done.

On Edit: I am not being unkind nor facetious in my reference to brain-damage. I am speaking literally of
children who are 12-13 and can barely function on a first grade level, due to physical issues with their brains
(like drug-addicted parents or having suffered severe abuse at home sexual and non-sexual).

[Skidmore]

14. Ah, yes. Hear this sort of thing

regularly from a couple of Teabagger/libertarian types I know who homeschool their kids because the require ideologically pure environments for their children. Amazingly, they live in extremely nice homes and have one income which apparently affords these couples to live in comfort while mom stays home fulltime to be the teacher. Also worth noting is that all of the people are college educated. Not every family can circumvent public education.

I think we need education to be public. The more we learn together, the more we must include others and their ideas into our worldview.

[woo me with science]

17. You need to read the OP again.

It does not argue against public education. It argues for a different quality of education.

On second thought, your gratuitous references to "Teabaggers" and "libertarians" suggests that you *did* read it and are merely trying to miscast what it actually says.

[Ohio Joe]

19. The guy should learn to make a point a bit sooner...

I read only half what was in the OP and thought 'teabagger' myself. I stopped because I'm sick of reading that drivel.

[Barack_America]

18. School teaches structure and this makes kids miserable?

And it is this childhood misery that creates miserable adults? The modern working world is just fine and dandy and satisfying, if it weren't for the school-induced misery people bring to it?

Wow.

Don't parents also teach structure and therefore make their kids miserable? Perhaps we should just be turning our children out into the wilderness if we want them to be truly unstructured/happy.

[senseandsensibility]

29. I agree.

You make very good points.

[reformist2]

20. We really need intellectuals to stop coming up with "big, new ideas" every 10 minutes.

First we hear kids need longer school days.

Then we hear that they need to be in school year round. That's the answer!

Now we hear that, no, kids don't need longer school years, there shouldn't be mandatory school at all!

Intellectuals, please shut up for just a moment, and go soak your heads.

[Phentex]

24. Yes, and they do the same for the curriculum...

I always wonder who these geniuses are who sit around and come up with a better way to teach something only to change their minds about it two years later.

I had a teacher tell me last week: "I'm old fashioned. I plan to teach the material and then test the students on what they've learned."

[reformist2]

44. It's the classic problem, if I may be a little un-PC, of too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

If only these geniuses in their ivory towers would get in the trenches and just TEACH!

[Igel]

34. Most of these ideas are being thrown out at the same time.

People are desperate.

For 60 years educational professors and researchers have come up with the "finally, we have the data to show what needs to be done" answer proving that "what we did before is obsolete and of course it couldn't work."

Teachers who have been around for 25 years look at the latest and greatest methods of teaching and say, "That's what we were taught 20 years ago. They've changed the name and this one thing here. It didn't work then."

We've spent billions and billions of dollars. Our spending on education--thanks largely to the exchange rate--is #3 in education for results far below #3. Poland does better than we do in many ways. For all the turmoil, for all the spending, for all the fads and fetishes and messiahs, we haven't improved much. And we're not likely to.

Harris County--where Houston is--just missed having a ballot measure that would impose a tax for early childhood education. It's a R/D kind of thing here, but also has a definite SES and racial skew to it. Few say that such programs help many kids. The effects fade by 5th or 6th grade. You can still tease them out statistically in college acceptance rates, but "statistically significant" doesn't mean "large" or "worth the investment." Most people interviewed mentioned education and then that it would save them money for daycare. The higher SES folk who would also demand it would see no improvement in their kids' academic achievement, but would also get free daycare. And when EC programs are cut, most of the hue and cry is, "Now I have to pay for daycare?" and "Who's going to take care of my kids?"

You can't make good blueberry muffins if you don't have some control over the quality of the blueberries. Bad bakers can make bad blueberry muffins, to be sure. But bad blueberry growers also make blueberry muffins bad.

[NuclearDem]

23. There's a whole laundry list of things wrong with the school system we know now

Budget cuts keep students hungry, home situations which may be damaging a student can't be sufficiently addressed, teach-and-test is failing, and, just like prisons, the administrations are far too obsessed with enforcing order and programming obedience, and cliques keep students' minds focused on their social standing rather than their education.

I got lucky in high school to have teachers that understood how broken the system was and did their best to work within it to make things better.

[gopiscrap]

28. interesting I am not totally sold

I know that for myself I had serious ADHD (wasn't a diagnosis then) but that's what I had, I wouldn't have survived with out some serious structure. Left to my own devises, I would have just run around and not learned anything.

[hfojvt]

35. ha, I was just thinking that

as I listen to my neighbor kids running around screaming this morning. Left to their own devices would they ever bother to read a book, learn multiplication, or write an essay?

I even noticed that myself. It wasn't until I learned I was to be attending graduate school that I got on my bicycle and went the 15 miles to the university library to check out and read books.

[gopiscrap]

37. yeah there's no way for me

unless I had an adult sitting on me til I was about 14 I couldn't even sit still to watch a half comedy program on tv. I was crack skinny and hyper as hell. No I am old and slow and heavy, but learn-ed

[Rosa Luxemburg]

32. Encourage vocational schools

Children shouldn't be trapped. School systems are always worried about behavior. Kids act up because they are bored. If they had interesting things to do then they wouldn't be bored. I have my students build things and do acting - getting them to move. Children look forward to it.

By high school I don't see how reading the Odyssey is much use to a child who wants to be a plumber. Engineering, science and math related studies would be more useful.

[liberal_at_heart]

33. That is too narrow. One problem I see with our public school system is we have abandoned

liberal arts. Things that help our children develop creativity and critical thinking. I love math and science but there is more to life than math and science. My daughter thrives best when she is taking French, art, and Literature/composition classes. And she has great creativity and critical thinking skills. My son does best when he is taking PE, science, and study hall class. Each child is an individual and should be treated as one.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

43. what I'm saying

is that kids can go down different tracks. If they want to do liberal arts then they can. The math and science might be more useful for plumbing? Our school middle schoolers have to make a decision of which track they want pursue at the beginning of 6th grade.

[LWolf]

36. I don't think I want to read this thread, even though it's an issue at the top of my priority list.

Having been on the front lines for 3 decades now, I have a knee-jerk reaction to all the experts that are going to tell me what's wrong with "the schools," or the system.

I KNOW what's wrong. I'm there every fucking day. And all of the discussions always seem to be obsessed with symptoms, not causes.

For the record, here are the some of the inter-related causes and tools of destruction:

1. Poverty.
2. Privatization.
3. Standardization.
4. Anti-public education and anti-teacher propaganda.
5. Political manipulation.
6. Lack of public will to spend the resources to provide a thriving, vibrant, healthy system.
7. Authoritarian, punitive control of the system and its parts.
8. Treating public education like a business instead of a public service.
9. High stakes testing.
10. Treating everyone but educators like experts on education.
11. Allowing non-educators to make policy.

For the record, this week in my own "prison," we:

Danced. Every day.

Laughed. Every day.

Shared. Every day.

Played learning games, which ended with students begging for "more."

Learned. Without pain.

Met before school so that students participating in sports could get the instruction they miss by leaving early DURING MY PREP, which means I'm there for an hour longer every night, long after my contractual obligation has ended, getting the work done I would have before school. Because those students know that they can show up at any time before school, and I'll drop what I'm doing and give them what they need, and because they showed up to our "prison" by choice. Not appointment or mandate.

This week, my "prison" saw a dozen former students, some in high school, some having graduated, come back to check in, see how things are going, and tell their former "warden" how things are going with them...because they know I want to know, and their former "prison" is still home to them.

I know how children learn best. I do the best I can within the limits set for me. Give me what I need to do better, and it will happen.

[liberal_at_heart]

38. Thank you for what you do LWolf. I got a call from my son's special education advocate and teacher

yesterday. She wanted to know if she could ask my son if he wanted to wear ear plugs during assemblies because he covers his ears when it is too noisy. I said yes though I didn't know if we would want to wear them or not. It really touched me that she called and that she was paying attention and cared about what my son was going through. At my son's last school his teacher and advocate never did anything like that. In fact most of the time he blamed my son for not wanting to participate in math class even though the reason he didn't want to participate is because they were forcing him to take grade level math when he was about two years behind his grade in math. There are out of this world great teachers and sadly there are not very good teachers. I am so grateful for all the out of this world great teachers my kids have had.

[Nine]

39. I don't disagree with his general points, but...

Despite his claim that he doesn't wish to present unstructured learning as a panacea, it seems that is exactly what he's doing. He seems a bit pie in the sky about the Sudbury-like schools he approves of while unfairly cynical about public schools in general. I think kids in school today enjoy quite a bit of freedom, certainly more than I had at my last professional job, which was basically in the mold of "Office Space." I also have to roll my eyes whenever I hear that improving schools has nothing to do with money. Of course it does. The more money, the more teachers, the smaller the class size, the more individualized the learning, the more creative the learning environment, etc. Teachers don't go into teaching so they can indoctrinate kids into either the 20th century industrial world or the strict religious environments of centuries earlier. And these notions about self-directed learning are not absent from teaching programs. And incidentally, the idea that kids will learn to read if you just stick a computer in their environment is about as silly as it gets. In general, though, I support the ideas that learning could be more student-centered and that grades should not be used as rewards and punishments. In fact, I'd support doing away with letter grades altogether since I don't think they convey any useful information.