A French translation of this article can be found here: École: défauts fondamentaux
Disclaimer: This article contains sensitive content. Even though the tone used is a bit satyrical, I will give my opinion without restraint. So, if you have some sympathies for school or if you are a teacher, I'll kindly advise you to end the reading here.
Consider yourself warned.
Another piece of warning: I'm mostly familiar with the educational system of France, perhaps not the best system, and perhaps not the worst. What I will talk about mostly applies to this specific country in the first place and to occidental countries in a second place. The point is: it could very well be that some points I will speak about doesn't concern the educational system of your country. So, do keep that in mind.
While the concept of hating school is not very original, one would often have these kind of feelings because he simply hates studying. I will try to elaborate on my personal reasons of why I hate school on a more fundamental level. I will do so by developping a series of points, following these axes: "Health", "Methodology", "What is this all about?" and "Counter-arguments".
The goal is not to spit on school for free, and it isn't to point fingers on some individuals like teachers or administrative personnel. My goal is to get it out of my chest and to share my point of view. And perhaps, who knows, it will initiate some interesting conversations.
I tried to be somewhat exhaustive, but the problematic of school is intertwined with multiple others: politics, economy, health, sociology, feminism, laicity, etc. Considering this, I just cannot do all the explaining and give all the justifications that some of the points I brought out deserves, sadly. So you will have to do your research in some instances or correlate to your own observations.
School is originally a space for teachers to transmit their knowledge and for students to receive it. Globally, this definition has subtly shifted away to something else, or something more. It is no longer only about transmitting knowledge but also about upbringing.
By every law, the parents should be the first educators of their childs. But now, children begin school at a very young age and spend most of their time there and not with their family (more on this later). I could add that nowadays, in addition to that, parents often trust their childs to nannies or put them to nurseries, thus the little time they could have with them is given away. But this is another subject. The point is that, if only for time reasons, parents no longer have the ability to properly raise their children, to educate them and teach them some morals. The task is thus now up to schools.
As you can imagine, all of this has consequences that I will expand more on in the "What is this all about?"'s section. But first, I would like to speak about more immediate subjects: health and methodologies.
Nutrition is the most important factor of good health by far, it determines almost everything: from the quality of your bones to your energy level and your mood (levels of insulin, hormone balance, ...). Good nutrition is particularly crucial to children which have to develop into adults. For instance, it will determine the development of their bone structure, a trait they will keep for life.
When children go to school, they often have to take their lunch there, for praticals reasons. Some of them, as interns, have to take all of their meals there. Thus, it is of the utmost importance that they are served good quality food in proper balance through satisfying meals.
Sadly the reality begs to differ. The meals are most often plant-based or even grain-based and lack a great deal of numerous micronutrients. Perhaps even worse, they contain a great deal of toxins, plant's version of antioxydants and antinutrients. The few animal-based dishes are cooked to death with a significant part of their nutrients left destroyed. So, I believe all the ingredients of malnutrition are there (sorry for the choice of word).
I will not develop this argument any further here, as properly developing it out would take a lot of time and space. It may become the subject of another article.
Again, there could be a lot of things to be said about sports. The relatively new idea of it being generally good for health is now widely popularized. While I think this idea is actually debatable, I will go with other angles: for instance, the evaluation aspect.
Apart from people who want to make a career of sports, there is no real use from aquired sports skills. For instance, if you train to put a ball in a basket, this skill will most probably not translate to any other aspect of your life: if you train basketball skills, you will only get better at basketball. So, for the vast majority of people, the only purpose of doing sports is for (supposedly) health benefits, isn't it?
In this regard, why is this evaluated? It would be like giving a notation on how you eat or how you sleep. You do these things spontaneously, nobody has to say that it's good for you and nobody has to remind you of doing it. So why are we doing it for sports? And doesn't that say something about the practice of sports?
One could retorcate that it serves to compensate the long hours during which students have to be static on a chair. But it only highlights some of the fundamental flaws of classes:
So, instead of letting children listen to their body and move when they want to, with the intensity they need, we force them to be static for long periods of time, and then we ask them of doing what is often very intensive exercise (read: very stressful), with the added bonus of grading them for this.
Perhaps an easy one is about scheduling, particularly sleep schedule. I don't think I need to remind anybody that sleep is incredibly important for health. It is needed to repair the body and process what we learned during the day. Sleep is even more important when the subject is under a lot of stress, for obvious reasons.
However, with current school schedules, and adding to that trip times, homework times and all the time necessary to a student to take care of himself, he will hardly be left with enough time to get enough sleep (for the average developing child, it's about 8 to 9 hours).
Therefore, there is a big chance students will already be put in a situtation of failure just because of this single point.
When you want to properly teach some knowledge to an individual, there are some essential steps you would have to follow:
In order to properly follow these steps, the teacher would necessarily have to have some personnal interactions with the student.
As we probably all know, there is more to a teacher than all that. Explicitely or implicitely the teacher will also have to:
Now, the average size of a class will often be about 20 to 30 students. It's 20 different individuals with various learning speeds, various motivations, various likings, various learning affinities, and again, the list goes on. Not only that but teachers often manage multiple classes, effectively multiplying the numbers.
As any parent of multiple childs would know, getting to know their childs, their strengths and their weaknesses, and more importantly getting to know how to make them grow, can be a hard, difficult and complicated task. Now, imagine this difficulty multiplied by at least 10. I believe it is next to unfeasible. The teacher will have to follow a schedule while trying to slow down fast students and speed up slow students, while they compete for and divide his attention.
The consequences are clearly visible: very rare are the teachers that follow the six points of teaching mentioned above. Not necessarily because they are not good, but simply because they just can't. Thus, and mainly because of sheer numbers, classes cannot fulfill their purpose.
The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything. Do not be afraid to make mistakes providing you do not make the same one twice. [Theodore Roosevelt]
Perhaps as a consequence of the previous point, corrections and notations are often done in a single step. Notation is bound to correction in a manner that often makes them both indistinguishable. Worse than that: how many times are they just one or two of these "nota-corrections" per subject? Then, a new subject is brought out and the cycle begins again.
In these conditions, a student will not have the opportunity to make mistakes and to learn from them, which goes against the way we learn as humans. He will be unable to apply what would be learned from the corrections, so he will have little interest in them. Incidentally, this means that most of the teacher's corrective work goes to naught.
Most of the tasks asked of a student are individual tasks. Also, the exams are taken individually, with very few exceptions. Contrast this with the real world where the vast majority of work is done in a collaborative way. In every way, collaborative work is the base of all societies. They wouldn't exist and wouldn't even mean anything without men working together. But schools does a poor job of preparing for this.
Creativity: the ability to produce original and unusual ideas, or to make something new or imaginative [dictionary.cambridge.org]
How many times a student will be invited or even asked to challenge what he is being taught? Most of the times, the opposite happens, the implicit message being: "you don't know, I know, shut up and listen". What is asked of the student is often in the line of conformity: he will have to follow the way of thinking of his teacher, how he solves problems, his narrative about some piece of knowledge, etc. This slowly kills the student's creativity and intuition as he will learn to resort to some specific methodologies and nothing else, as he has to adopt the point of view of his teacher to be able to restituate it on some piece of paper. If he want good grades at least.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that I am against methodologies, formalism or even some level of conformity; after all we learn a lot by simply imitating others. What I want to point out here is when the students are consistently put into a mold. When each of their original ideas, each of their different intuitions are consistently discarded in order to fit this mold. This, is really destructive.
Not only it breaks the student's confidence, but also and again, it is doing a poor job at preparing them at real life, where the opposite strives: in the real world creative thinking and original ideas are highly valued.
Who hasn't ever been bored in school? Boredom seems like a curse that plagues everyone. Students will have to pay attention to his teacher while all they can think about most of the time is "please, I want something to happen!". They will thus learn to feel a subtle mix of hate and resignation towards their situation, and towards boredom. Chances are, they will do all they can to avoid boredom, when they can avoit it.
But I would actually argue that boredom is not a bad thing in itself, especially if the subject is in condition of being able to properly think or contemplate. Then in this case, boredom can be a major factor of creativity. Therefore, by making someone flee any opportunity of boredom, we effectively destroy most opportunities for him to be creative.
One thing that quickly stupefied me as a student is that I was never taught how to learn, as useful a skill it may seem to me in general, and especially useful during scholarship where we mainly have to quicly memorize knowledge and quickly restituate it. Therefore, shouldn't be "learning how to learn" the first thing to be taught?
Not only that but teaching methods rarely goes beyond repeating things orally to a class. A huge amount of research for decades have been done but schools still haven't caught up. I've barely heard and sometimes not heard at all some terms like "mind map", "spaced repetition", "relaxation", "visualization". We don't even learn as students that we learn a lot better by doing than by listening or reading (combined or not). Thus, if you take the best case scenario as a student and you have a good auditory memory, you will have a fair edge over most of your classmates but it will still be far from optimal for you.
Again, the typical schema is: several weeks of lessons on a particular subject, then an exam on it and then another subject is brought up and the cycle begins again. There is little continuity between different courses and between different years and the cycles are short (we are talking about weeks-long cycles, rarely months and almost never years). If by any chance a suject studied in a previous year is brought up, then the students are not really expected to remember about it and the subject is studied again to enable the resuming of the course.
So the information is short-lived and students are only motivated to learn for the next exam, which most of the time will be within days or weeks. There is little to no building of knowledge. The natural outcome of this is that months later the average student will vaguely remember its lesson, and years later, most if not all of it will be gone. Contrast this with the alleged goal of schools which is to prepare for the future lives of its students. How students could be prepared when at the time they enter active life they would have forgotten all about what has been taught to them in school? So, the second natural outcome of this is that students will have the (mostly verified) impression of doing it all for nothing, in vain, which is very demotivating. Once again, they are put in a situation of failure.
Let's imagine you are a student, aware of some realities: you know that if you simply follow the normal cursus, you'll simply waste your time. And, because you're pushed by society, by your family, just about everyone in your world, you realize you have about one choice left: to obtain good grades and to graduate. Otherwise you're comdemned to repeat years, condemned to go again to classes you hate. Moreother, if you have the bad idea of being a bit ambitious and to want a good life, then you will have to double your amount of work as you will have to work for school and work for yourself, the last being the only part that would have some chance of lastingness.
In 1882 in France, the Jules Ferry's law make school obligatory for children aged from 6 to 13 years old. Now, education in school is mandatory for children aged from 3 to 16 years old, and young people aged 16 to 18 have the obligation to train. [1]
I would like to point out that at the age of 3, it will still be crucial for the child to feel loved and appreciated from his parents, especially the mother. It will be necessary for him to develop a sane ego and confidence in himself. Otherwise, he will be wounded for life and will always try to fill in a void in himself. While it is good for the economy, because it makes good consumers, we are preparing generations of degenerate people in mass.
Additionally, it seems that younger school entries do not yield better results at the end of the day. In fact, it seems to be the opposite:
Does starting school at a younger age affect students' long-term outcomes? This study provides comparative evidence of the impact of school starting age using data from recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) cycles across 16 countries. Relying on an instrumental variable strategy, the estimates reveal that the age at school entry significantly influences the cognitive performance of 15-year-old students. Those who are younger at school start tend to face more challenging educational trajectories compared to their older peers. Moreover, early school entry has a substantial impact on social and emotional skills, including self-confidence, motivation, persistence, and engagement, which may have enduring effects on their future life outcomes. These effects are more pronounced for students from disadvantaged backgrounds but vary significantly across different educational systems. [2]
Childs are normally very curious creatures. They seem to always have the word "why" in their mouth. So, for instance, if a teacher asks of a child to be polite, the child asking "why one should be polite?" is to be expected. Would the teacher answer the same thing as the child's parents? probably not. And more importantly, the teacher may not have the same set of morals as the parents. Then, truly, the child will reflect a different upbringing in adulthood than what his parents could have wished for him.
Let's say for instance that the parents are Catholics. They value their religion and take their child to the church every sunday. They also take the time to teach him the rudiments of the religion. But at the same time, the child is going to school. There he will not be able to put into practice his faith and it will even be difficult for him to talk about it, as, under the cover of accepting all existing religions, all religions are effectively soft-banned. He will identify to atheist teachers and will be exposed to a lot of external views while he doesn't have the maturity and the knowledge to defend his own faith. The natural outcome of all this is that the child's faith will wither and die.
As they say « The best way of erasing an idea is to replace it with another idea », and school teaches its own religions, namely science and democracy. How can I say that science is taught as a religion, you might ask. Well, it's because most people think of science as if it always reflect the truth, the reality. Which it does not, on the one part because science develops theories which are there to be refuted, one the other part because the majorities of studies are financed by companies that have interests in the results of said studies.
1] [Instruction obligatoire 2] [How age at school entry affects future educational and socioemotional outcomes: Evidence from PISA
The majorities of the teachers out there are people that began teaching straight after getting their qualification. So, they only know about studying, and perhaps about some part-time jobs, therefore I think it's fair to say that they have little to no real-life experience. Thus, the question is: what does these people have to transmit? They will try to directly teach what they have been taught, without having the time to actually assimilate and use in practical way their knowledge.
You may also notice that the majority of the teachers are female [1][2]. Nothing wrong with female teachers as such, but the proportions are problematic. Boys often don't have anyone to identify with, and a lot of the girls will grow without any paternal figure. Indeed, about half of marriages end up in a divorce, and in the vast majority of the cases, the mother takes custody of the children.
This shows yet again that school is not about transmission anymore, and that the fondamental interests of the students are not taken into consideration (if not for a willingness in making a future generation of deconstructed people).
One more observation that I could make, but perhaps it is biased: discussing things as a parent with teachers can prove to be difficult as they most often have the attitude of someone who knows better than you (or at least that would be what they appear to think). So you make an observation or suggest something, but no, you're just a parent so shut up: you don't know what you're talking about. This is a problem because, as the first educators, parents trust the teachers to do a part of their job and the teachers are supposed to work in tandem with the parents. But this kind of attitude, justified or not, closes the discussion immediately which is against their very purpose.
1] [Percentage of female teachers by teaching level of education 2] [Who are the nation’s 4 million teachers?
History is written by the winners.
For the elephant in the room: schools are the perfect place for the states to teach to the future generations how to be a good citizen for them. We can therefore observe that what is being taught is generally not neutral: school programs are vehiculing ideologies, ideas and are, in some ways, designed to indoctrinate the students.
Take for instance history classes, which exposes some facts and leaves some others in the dust, which sometimes even distort the truth. All of that to comply to some political party, or to some ideology.
Another instance of this is how the evolution's theory is presented in science classes. Indeed, it is presented as if this theory is just the truth, which isn't very "scientific" as the main characteristics of a scientific theory should be reproducibility and refutability. Why then isn't it presented as a subject to some refutations?
Yet another example is the gender theory, which again is presented as a truth.
So, we can safely say that the trust that people have in science is used against them to convey some specific ideas. Other courses such as history or language classes are also used for this purpose.
Apart from what is being taught and how it is taught, what is interesting to notice is the subjects that are actually not taught. Yet, there would be several subjects that would be useful for everyone to learn. To name a few:
As we can see and once again, the goal of today's schools is no longer to simply transmit knowledge in order to prepare childs to their future lives. The goal is now first and foremost to make obedient citizens, and good consumers. It is to give a specific direction in life.
Think about it: as a child you will be strongly encouraged to go to school and to complete it, to graduate. Then, you will be strongly encouraged to go to some University or some other institution and to study for at least three to five years. Then, you'll probably work as a salary man at some company. You'll work some years but you cannot save much because you bought some car, rented some flats, and you travel during holidays. At around your thirties, you'll think about settling down. And you'll think about making a family. You'll probably settle for someone who is also at his thirties and who has already had his fair share of encounters, to put it mildly. If you're still somewhat traditionnal as a man you'll then pay for engagement rings, wedding rings, wedding dress, wedding party, honeymoon trip and certainly many other things. You'll soon need more space and you'll buy a house and take at least a 25-year loan. As you and your spouses are both above thirty, you will probably have a hard time conceiving a child. A fact that is especially true of women: «In their 30s, women are about half as fertile as they are in their early 20s»[1]. Actually, there is a 10% chance you won't be able to do it at all[1]. Finally, you conceive a child, and several years later, a second one. You're now near your forties. But soon after you get a divorce, as half of the couples out there, which is initiated by the woman (about 75% of the divorces are). Of course, the mother takes custody of the children. Meanwhile, you get slowly promoted at your job and get some raises, but you don't see much of the benefits as the inflation is also raising, and you have to take care of your childrens (directly or with an alimony). Finally you're getting old and you're thinking about retirement. If you're lucky you'll have some kind of pension. If you're even luckier, you will burden your childs to take care of you.
Though this description is arguably on the negative side, I believe it isnt' that much far off the truth and describes approximately the lives of many people in the occidental world. And school is preparing, in fact is conditionning its students to live like this; among other things of course, like the medias or the fact that children tend to reproduce parental schema. The average child will be bombared with life imperatives by all his environments, and the biggest environment he has nowadays is school (just a simple matter of where he spends the most time).
Notice that the average age of marriage has shifted by ten years to older ages at the very least, and the same kind of shift can be observed for the age at which people start working. Society pushes children to study until at least their early twenties (I'm not saying there is no reason to, I'm just inviting you to consider the consequences of that), and then they end up in a situation where they would want to justify all the time they spent and invested in studying, so they start working for at least several years. So, there is an obvious change of paradigm as family life is left behind to favor career instead. Why is that? And, the obvious question: is this the kind of lives you want for yourself or for your children?
1] [How common is infertility?
It seems that there is a consensus on the opinion that teaching to a class is more efficient than doing otherwise, like teaching individually. The reasons for that seem obvious. Let's say that, as a teacher, you repeat an information 5 times in a class, to have some probability that the students got this information (I'm being generous): you will waste a lot less time if you repeat 5 times an information to n children than if you repeat this same information 5, i.e. by teaching individually. But I doubt that it is that more efficient, because of all the diversity of students, because of the uniqueness of each personal interactions. Plus, you just cannot be that concentrated for a long period of time on someone who is talking to everyone and no one in particular. It's far easier to concentrate on someone who is talking to you directly and personally. You'll then naturally feel implicated. How many childs have only really learned about something by talking to their teacher at the end of the class? Or by getting some explanations about a lesson by their parents? This is something you can actually observe: top of the class children have most often heavily implicated parents behind them.
To be fair, I'm perfectly conscious of the fact that a lot of people might say, reading this article: "this is all good and well, but in order to live we both (mother and father) have to work", or "in order to do better, we would have to pay a private school, we don't have the means for that", etc. And these could be all perfectly legitimate claims.
An argument I've heard in favor of schooling concerns children's social life: by getting in a school they are able to encounter and meet all kind of people and make many friends. While I think this is actually true, I also think that they don't need school for that. If for instance, a boy likes football, and goes to a football club, he will also have some chances to make friends there. In fact, his chances will actually be higher than in school because he will share a common interest with the other club's members, whereas he will not necessarily have anything in common with his school's classmates. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you have to share common interests with someone to befriend him. But a solid friendship is based on respect and trust, and you can't respect and trust someone you don't share any values with. And, as public schools mix children of very different backgrounds, these kind of situations where a child don't share anything substancial with anyone is not that rare, and these childs will experience being alone between many.
First of all, congratulations to those who read the article in its entirety until this line! You may have find it quite lengthy, but I do believe there was a lot to be said on the subject.
For all the reasons I presented in this article, I'm against the very principle of school, which, in its current configuration, is so flawed in my eyes that I see no positive outcome out of it, unless by accident. I mean, accidents do happen! But we shouldn't count on them, should we?
If you have some recrimination against my points or if you want me to add something, please contact me at ghuter@disroot.org. Same if you want to make some language corrections or add a new translation.