School Is Prison, Kids Like Freedom

“After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches. I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.  We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

-John Taylor Gatto, author of Weapons of Mass Instruction

In a world that seems to change with each fallen grain of sand, America’s stagnant educational system is more than just a squirmy swampland of lead balloons.

It’s repressive and counterproductive to real education. It stifles natural curiosity and creativity, sometimes even stomping them both out completely.

Few could, with a straight face, make the case that our current education system can be even remotely considered “successful.” It is, without mincing words, rotten to the (common) core.

Even so, those in charge of “educating” children would rather focus on treating the symptoms rather than facing up to the disease.

That’s right…

As the ship sinks into the oxygenless abyss of the deep, dark cavernous sea, the policy makers and their estranged huddle of ‘social scientists’ suggest we rearrange the furniture on the poop deck.

The professional moral busybodies waste no time, for example, frantically pointing to the hottest “evidence-based” study in the public spank bank.

“If teacher does [X],” the study begins, possibly under the presupposition that individuals are little more than a predictable series of conditioned responses, “then [Y] will happen [enter arbitrary number]% of the time.”

“Oh, your students are bored?” the social scientists will ask. “Angry? Insubordinate? Potentially suicidal? Well, don’t worry. One study says if you place seven big happy faces around the room, it’ll trick their brains into thinking that they’re in a happy place. Try it out! Thanks for stopping by!”

“Wait. That’s seriously your advice?”

The public school system, in sum, treats kids like lab rats. Worse, it treats them like they’re all the same rat. In an effort, it seems, to create the perfect “rat park” in which future generations of drones will obediently frolic.

Even more mind-blowing is the social meddlers act surprised — with genuine astonishment in their eyes — that their schemes never work out as planned.

All we’ve really discovered, it seems, in this century-long experiment in state-sanctioned indoctrination is this: When you severely curtail a child’s ability to grow, discover and explore on his or her own terms, the child will not care to live up to your compulsory — and completely arbitrary — expectations.

Simply because, just maybe, children understand something that many of us “grown people” seem to have forgotten: They shouldn’t have to.

Again, this isn’t a fringe topic.

Even mainstream sources have been pointing out the obvious for years. Consider the following from an article in Psychology Today a few years back:

“If your child hates school it is probably not his fault,” says neurologist and middle-school teacher Dr. Judy Willis, “nor that of his teacher, but rather it can be evidenced that his brain is functioning appropriately.”

That’s right. If a child reacts negatively in a compulsory classroom, says the neurologist, it often means his or her brain is functioning properly.

Dr. Willis continues…

Healthy brains protect their owners from perceived threat. School today is stressful, often threatening, as a result of the high-stakes standardized testing that challenges students, teachers, and school administrators.

There is so much information mandated as required ‘knowledge,’ for these tests (that determine federal funding), that for many children school seems more like a feedlot force-feeding them facts without adequate time or resources to make them interesting or relevant.

In this situation, in humans as in animals, the involuntary behavioral reactions are essentially limited to three responses: Fight, Flight, or Freeze.

Unfortunately, Dr. Willis’ wisdom begins to wane after that important insight. Her “solution,” as sad as it is to report, is predictably irrational.

Silly us.

We presumed Dr. Willis would conclude, after such a shrewd moment of sagacity, that education should conform to each individual child — so that he or she can evolve in the manner which suits him or her best.

No kid is the same. Why treat them as such?

Yet, we were wrong.

Instead, Dr. Willis believes you should keep encouraging your child to conform to a system which, even she admits, is abhorrent to a properly-functioning brain.

To that end, the doc prescribes the following:

You can reduce your child’s automatic reaction to the boredom and frustration of school and homework by linking your children’s positive emotions to their one-size-fits-all classrooms.

Once more…

“Wait. That’s seriously your advice?”

We came across a radically different — and far more sane — idea this past weekend. It’s called unschooling.

Unschooling goes by many different names, some of which are fairly self-explanatory: delight-driven learning, child-led learning, interest-led learning, life-experience learning, relaxed homeschooling, child-centered learning, and passion-driven learning.

Put simply, it’s the act of allowing your child to be in charge of his or her own education.

“After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches,” John Taylor Gatto, author of Weapons of Mass Instruction writes, “I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.  We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”

Hey, maybe we’re idiots.

But we can’t shake this strange suspicion that the educational system should be more about a child’s growth and less about “creative conformity.”

What’s missing, as Peter Gray points out in today’s featured article below, is the good ol’ attention-starved elephant on the couch.

The reason children don’t like school, he says, is simple. School is prison. And, guess what? Kids like freedom.

Read on…

Children Don’t Like School Because They Love Freedom

By Peter Gray

Someone recently referred me to a book that they thought I’d like. It’s a 2009 book, aimed toward teachers of grades K through 12, titled Why Don’t Students Like School?

It’s by a cognitive scientist named Daniel T. Willingham, and it has received rave reviews by countless people involved in the school system. Google the title and author and you’ll find pages and pages of doting reviews and nobody pointing out that the book totally and utterly fails to answer the question posed by its title.

Willingham’s thesis is that students don’t like school because their 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.

Presumably, if teachers followed Willingham’s advice and used the latest information cognitive science has to offer about how the mind works, students would love school.

Talk about avoiding the elephant in the room!

Ask any schoolchild why they don’t like school and they’ll tell you. “School is prison.” They may not use those words, because they’re too polite, or maybe they’ve already been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it can’t be prison. But decipher their words and the translation generally is, “School is prison.”

Let me say that a few more times: School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison. School is prison.

Willingham surely knows that school is prison. He can’t help but know it; everyone knows it. But here he writes a whole book entitled “Why Don’t Students Like School,” and not once does he suggest that just possibly they don’t like school because they like freedom, and in school they are not free.

I shouldn’t be too harsh on Willingham. He’s not the only one avoiding this particular elephant in the room. Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody says it.

It’s not polite to say it.

We all tiptoe around this truth, that school is prison, because telling the truth makes us all seem so mean. How could all these nice people be sending their children to prison for a good share of the first 18 years of their lives?

How could our democratic government, which is founded on principles of freedom and self-determination, make laws requiring children and adolescents to spend a good portion of their days in prison?

It’s unthinkable, and so we try hard to avoid thinking it. Or, if we think it, we at least don’t say it. When we talk about what’s wrong with schools we pretend not to see the elephant, and we talk instead about some of the dander that’s gathered around the elephant’s periphery.

But I think it is time that we say it out loud. School is prison.

If you think school is not prison, please explain the difference.

The only difference I can think of is that to get into prison you have to commit a crime, but they put you in school just because of your age. In other respects school and prison are the same. In both places you are stripped of your freedom and dignity.

You are told exactly what you must do, and you are punished for failing to comply. Actually, in school you must spend more time doing exactly what you are told to do than is true in adult prisons, so in that sense school is worse than prison.

At some level of their consciousness, everyone who has ever been to school knows that it is prison. How could they not know? But people rationalize it by saying (not usually in these words) that children need this particular kind of prison and may even like it if the prison is run well.

If children don’t like school, according to this rationalization, it’s not because school is prison, but is because the wardens are not kind enough, or amusing enough, or smart enough to keep the children’s minds occupied appropriately.

But anyone who knows anything about children and who allows himself or herself to think honestly should be able to see through this rationalization.

Children, like all human beings, crave freedom. They hate to have their freedom restricted. To a large extent they use their freedom precisely to educate themselves. They are biologically prepared to do that.

That’s what many of my previous posts have been about (for an overview, see my July 16, 2008, post). Children explore and play, freely, in ways designed to learn about the physical and social world in which they are developing. In school they are told they must stop following their interests and, instead, do just what the teacher is telling them they must do. That is why they don’t like school.

As a society we could, perhaps, rationalize forcing children to go to school if we could prove that they need this particular kind of prison in order to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to become good citizens, to be happy in adulthood, and to get good jobs.

Many people, perhaps most people, think this has been proven, because the educational establishment talks about it as if it has. But, in truth, it has not been proven at all.

In fact, for decades, families who have chosen to “unschool” their children, or to send them to the Sudbury Valley School (which is, essentially, an “unschool” school) have been proving the opposite (see, for example, my August 13, 2008, post).

Children who are provided the tools for learning, including access to a wide range of other people from whom to learn, learn what they need to know–and much more–through their own self-directed play and exploration.

There is no evidence at all that children who are sent to prison come out better than those who are provided the tools and allowed to use them freely. How, then, can we continue to rationalize sending children to prison?

I think the educational establishment deliberately avoids looking honestly at the experiences of unschoolers and Sudbury Valley because they are afraid of what they will find. If school as prison isn’t necessary, then what becomes of this whole huge enterprise, which employs so many and is so fully embedded in the culture (see my posts on Why Schools Are What they Are)?

Willingham’s book is in a long tradition of attempts to bring the “latest findings” of psychology to bear on issues of education. All of those efforts have avoided the elephant and focused instead on trying to clean up the dander. But as long as the elephant is there, the dander just keeps piling up.

In a future post I’ll talk about some of the history of psychology’s failed attempts to improve education. Every new generation of parents, and every new batch of fresh and eager teachers, hears or reads about some “new theory” or “new findings” from psychology that, at long last, will make schools more fun and improve learning.

But none of it has worked. And none of it will until people face the truth: Children hate school because in school they are not free.

Joyful learning requires freedom.

Regards,

Peter Gray Ph.D
Author, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students For Life

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