Why School Sucks – Part 2

Welcome to the second post in the Why School Sucks series. No preface this time, if you read the first post then you understand the context, if you haven’t read it, you can access it here. This second post is going to focus on the student and teacher experience and why, both students and teachers think school sucks and this comes down to motivation. I want to be clear that I believe the idea and concept of school sucking, from the student point-of-view, likely stems from an inability to understand and articulate what they experience in school.  Teachers on the other hand may love teaching, but school and the educational landscape is so tightly wrapped up in political agendas that it makes it difficult for teachers to do their work.  Some of these entail a complex set of ideas, goals and agendas from the various stakeholders who continuously call for reviews (such as in initial teacher education), reforms (such as curriculum reform) and a million other things that school are being asked to do (such as mandatory sexual consent classes), on top of everything teachers already do.

There was an awakening during the pandemic that teachers actually have tough jobs. Millions of parents around the world had to start taking some responsibility for their children’s learning and many found the task was beyond them. Now imagine having that daily task for 20-30 children as a primary school teacher, or worse a high school teacher, who could have up to 200 students across six years in two different discipline areas. Not only do they have to teach the classes, but also create those lessons, create the assessments, mark the assessments, keep parents informed, meet with and speak to parents etc. I can’t possibly go through everything that teachers do, it is exhausting just thinking about it, but I think parents got a small taste of it while their children were forced to stay at home last year. But the teaching and learning isn’t the part that sucks for teachers, for most that’s why they got into the profession.  What sucks, for both teachers and students is the lack of motivation many feel in their work.

While there are a number of ideas about motivation in ed-psych literature, I prefer those put forth by author Dan Pink in his book, Drive, which are: Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose.  These are the driving forces of motivation built on Dan’s own observations and experience, but more importantly adopted from self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) and Carol Dweck’s mindset theory, specifically growth mindset.

So, I know you’re wondering how all this comes together and when am I going to get to all the good stuff about school sucking, well here it is: The premise of the argument is that by understanding what motivates students and the philosophical underpinnings of all educational thinking, which relies on three foundational yet incompatible ideas, we are better able to see how these ideas impact the experiences of teachers and students in the classroom. In other words: How do teachers and students find mastery, autonomy and purpose in their work? There was a great analogy in one of Sir Ken Robinson’s talks where he uses different types of restaurants to understand the choices made in regards to schooling. He says that we had a choice in schooling between an al a carte dining experience versus fast food restaurant experience, and collectively in the western world, we chose the fast-food version of education.  In other words, we could have chosen either a very personalised and individual approach to education, but instead chose a standardised economical approach that doesn’t allow for individual choice and preference.

The problem with the approach we’ve chosen, is that for most teachers and students, it sucks. Teachers are often under so much pressure to teach the content required by their schools that they don’t have the time to personalise the content for student choice and preference. And when the material is not personalised and/or individualised for students they often struggle to find relevance (purpose) in the content. The problem isn’t learning and teaching it is that we have forgotten, or simply dismissed, the foundational principles of Drive  and Grit in the everyday lives of our teachers and students. Why do teachers want to teach and why do students want to go to school (this will be the focus of next week’s post)?

Most teachers want to teach to make a difference in the lives of their students, but have become so disillusioned by the bureaucracy that their motivation wanes in the early years of their career.  Students, whether they want to go to school or not, have to go, so we’ve moved to a point where we think of them as the output of teachers’ work, rather than as clients or customers that we are serving. I think we need to move to a more business-oriented model, where the students are clients and customers and their satisfaction and engagement with the product is at least as important as the measures that manifest from that engagement.  This may not be a popular view (but that’s why I started my own blog), but until maximising student potential is the KPI for schools and teachers, school will continue to suck.