Why School Sucks – Part 1

Welcome to my first post in the Why School Sucks series. This series will be what I’m calling short reads: posts that are about 500-1000 words or about ¼ – ½ as long as what I would normally write. Intermittently, I will throw in some short reads, the first three of which will be the Why School Sucks Series, which will be published fortnightly starting today.  So, to answer your first question: Yes… I decided that school sucks so bad that I needed to devote three posts to the idea, rather than just one. I have to give credit to Dr Tae for his talk on Building a new culture of teaching and learning, which provided the inspiration for writing this series. So why would a former teacher and current teacher educator write a series of blogs entitled, Why School Sucks!, well, because I believe that school, in its current state, and by current I mean the past few decades, does suck.  It sucks for most students and it also sucks for most teachers.  The premise for the argument really lies in a previous post where I discuss the many stakeholders in schooling all with varying agendas.  But one stakeholder, for the most part, gets completely left out the picture when it comes to what is taught and expected to be learned in schools – the students. That’s why this first post will focus on the student experience and why students are the biggest promulgators of the school sucks idea.

If we ignore the fact that there are competing and incongruent agendas in curriculum, most would agree that school is supposed to be a place of learning, right? Ok, so if we agree that school is a place of learning, then why doesn’t it function like that?  School has a set curriculum, which may or may not be of interest to students; they are coerced, incentivised and forced to learn in a certain way, within a certain time-frame and with arbitrary constraints, all of which has nothing to do with learning. Here is a thought experiment for you: Think of something you’ve always wanted to learn – maybe it’s learning to surf or play the guitar or even how to do your own taxes, it doesn’t particularly matter what it is.  Now think about how you would or could learn how to do any of those things.  Now think about your own or your child’s schooling experience.  Do the pictures align?  In other words, is the way you imagine learning something that you’ve always wanted to learn similar to the experience of schooling?  I have to imagine that for most people learning and the experience of schooling are very different things. If you picture learning to surf – there is an instructor (teacher) who demonstrates techniques that you then practice on land. Once you have those mastered then you move into the water where you practice those same techniques, on small waves, with the instructor giving you tips and correcting mistakes along the way. If this is where the story stopped the parallels between school and surfing seem similar. One can imagine a teacher demonstrating how to write a short story, or how to solve a quadratic equation. She would demonstrate this first and then allow the students to practice, hopefully walking around and correcting work, maybe giving tips on how to improve – it’s the same right? Well no!  The difference comes in the next phase of the schooling experience, the part that ignores learning. After the students have been given a set amount of time to practice, the teacher gives a test, marks that test and then provides a grade, a comment and moves onto the next topic.  Some students did well and got As and Bs others didn’t fare so well and got Ds and Es (In the Australian system we have A-E grading – A [well above grade level] C [at grade level] E [well below grade level]. This is not learning – I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not learning. If we go back to the surfing comparison, there is no test in surfing – and not everyone is ready to move from 1-2ft waves to 5-6ft waves at the same time, like they are forced to move on in school.  The test in surfing is whether you caught the wave and whether you have the confidence to move on to the next level. In school, it doesn’t matter if you caught the wave or not (got an A on the test), whether you think you’re ready or not (have the confidence to move on to the next topic) – the test is over, you received your grade and everyone moves to the next topic (the 5-6ft wave) whether or not they feel ready. The result of this is that students say School Sucks! Most often, they can’t articulate why they feel that way, but they know something is not right about what is happening.  Think about it: if you were forced to learn something you maybe didn’t want to or care to learn and then were told, by way of a grade, that you were no good at said learning, and then you were told to do harder content even though you didn’t understand the easier content, you might say that school sucks too.  And here’s the kicker – we expect students to be compliant with a system that doesn’t particularly work.  And because students are not always compliant (read: ‘they misbehave’) schools implement a set of rewards and punishments to coerce students to ‘behave’ and be complacent to a system that doesn’t care about their learning.  When a system that is supposed to facilitate student learning doesn’t prioritise student learning, we end up with a sucky system.