Chapter 1: School Daze

You have been robbed. Your family, friends, and neighbors have been robbed. I know because I have witnessed this crime for thirty years – twenty-three as a student and seven as a high school teacher. Perhaps I should not expose our education system as the thief. I did well in school. I got good grades, scholarships, and full-time employment in the field. However, at every level, I found the experience to be shallow and tedious. As much as I believe in the potential of school, I object to how it repeatedly steals our passion, talent, and joy. I am not alone. Every generation echoes a similar frustration:

We are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that the teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children's conversation, motion, and merriment … are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, questions, conversation, and motion are prohibited.

– Leo Tolstoy, 1862

Monday morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so – because it began another week's slow suffering in school … Presently it occurred to him that he wished he was sick; then he could stay home from school … He canvassed his system. No ailment was found, and he investigated again. This time he thought he could detect colicky symptoms, and he began to encourage them with considerable hope. But they soon grew feeble, and presently died wholly away.

– Mark Twain, 1876

My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever: it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.

– George Bernard Shaw, 1910

I was happy as a child with my toys in my nursery. I have been happier every year since I became a man. But this interlude of school makes a sombre grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.

– Winston Churchill, 1930

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

– Albert Einstein, 1946

I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.

– John Gardner, 1968

The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It's a good nonspecific symptom; I'm a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you that a good phony fever is a dead lock, but, uh… you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor's office. That's worse than school. You fake a stomach cramp, and when you're bent over, moaning and wailing, you lick your palms. It's a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.

– Ferris Bueller, 1986

Students absorb the message that learning is a joyless succession of hoops through which they must jump, rather than a way of understanding and mastering the world.

– Anna Quindlen, 2005

These quotations are not the isolated bitter ravings of a few malcontents. They are angry declarations that reflect the alienation and disappointment shared by much of our society. They are taken from books, speeches, plays, and movies that were popular in their times, precisely because they struck a chord with audiences. In each case, the ideas of the author resonated with the thoughts of the general public.

When it comes to fiction, I cannot think of a single story that portrays high school as intrinsically wonderful. Mainstream cinema provides many examples: Blackboard Jungle (1955), Teachers (1984), and Election (1999). Even movies with a positive message are about educators who rise above the fundamental inadequacy of the system. To Sir, with Love (1967), Dead Poets Society (1989), and Freedom Writers (2007) all acknowledge that the secondary school system is horrible – with the exception of one teacher. No novel, movie, or television show has ever been based on the premise that high school is inherently liberating because audiences would not believe it.

My favorite education-related film is Snow Day (2000). I have not actually seen the film, just the trailer. The movie does not seem poised to win a retroactive Academy Award, nor does it seem worth my $5 to rent. But its mere existence highlights the universal reaction to a snow day. Having experienced several of these as a teacher, I have a couple of observations.

First, at the sight of snow – or, as I like to call it, white gold – there is a sense of anticipation from both students and teachers. When a snow day becomes official, anticipation turns into pure joy.

My second observation: on a snow day, teachers make it into the building. In all my years as a teacher, my school never closed due to inclement weather; the buses were canceled many times, but the school remained open and fully staffed. As soon as the buses were canceled, students abandoned the building, thus dropping attendance so severely that classes could not run. Teachers did little to discourage this exodus because it gave them a chance to catch up on marking and other tasks. I once heard a principal say, at a staff meeting, “Today was a snow day; students like it, teachers like it, but more than any other group, administrators like it.” How unfortunate that school – with its vast potential for discovery and enlightenment – generates this kind of reaction.

To ensure that I am not misrepresenting public opinion, let me turn to a more reputable source – a source stripped of all bias and pretense, a source capable of quickly capturing the pulse of the English-speaking world, a source that allows me to do research at home in my pajamas: Google. I searched for a variety of terms to gain some insight into society’s collective thoughts. Here is what I found:

Table 1.1: Frequency of Google Search Terms

The majority of people seem to dislike school. Although terms like “rocks” and “sucks” may be more reflective of vocabulary than public opinion, a pattern of discontent remains when more common terms are used. More than twice as many people hate school than love school. Yet this is not because people are incapable of expressing love or apt to complain. I was encouraged to discover that, according to Google, expressions of love are five times more frequent than expressions of hate. In other words, people specifically hate school.

To confirm my suspicions, I consulted a more conventional source. Telephone surveys have long documented opinions about school. The longest running survey is the annual “Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll”, in which adults are asked to grade public schools from A–F.¹ In the last decade, F has ranged from 3%–6%, whereas A has never exceeded 2%. As with the Google data, more people think school is horrible than fantastic. Yet at 51%, the most common response was C. Does this mean that Internet searches reveal only strong opinions and ignore the silent majority? Not necessarily. Broad ratings do not shed light on specific concerns, nor do they establish whether people want change. In another survey, when adults were asked directly about school reform, 83% thought it was “very urgent” or “extremely urgent” to improve high schools.²

  Also in this chapter ...

• Student opinions of school
• Busywork and boredom in class
• International comparisons of education

This is an excerpt from Chalkbored: What's Wrong with School and How to Fix It. Order the book here.