I was substitute teaching the other day, and came across a scene which I would have expected to be from my past. I had a study hall class of 9th graders, and saw that the boys were acting in a manner which I remembered from my own past. You see, it was quite obvious that they hated being in school, and that school was starting to hate them back. These were some bright young men who seem to have fallen through the cracks of academic opportunity.
This scene caused me to consider what the purpose of public education really is… After talking to these boys in study hall, I wondered about the real value of state standards for various curricula, whether these documents were to ensure that every students gets opportunities to learn things which will be important and of value to his or her life, or whether these sorts of documents are to provide teachers and administrators with institutional coverage for the obvious shortcomings in the present system.
Back in my time, when I was in 9th grade I had some similar thoughts about school. I found school to be too slow and trite for words. I found it almost impossible to continuously read ‘Ethan Frome’ for a whole school quarter. The teachers all expected us to be motivated and work as hard as possible, but never gave us reasons that made any sense, and these same teachers were quite obviously ‘phoning in’ their lessons. For what it’s worth, these experiences are some of my prime motivations to be a teacher now!
I guess I should narrow my point a little, because in every class there are some students who are quite motivated and will literally do anything assigned in order to get a good grade. Then there are some of the students in the middle, they will try as much as the rest of their peers…and then there are the students who have trouble. These students, at the bottom of the school food chain have as many reasons for poor performance (i.e. there are no simple answers), and these students are all over the map with regard to abilities, focus, background, and motivation.
From my experience the other day, I saw that there has been no real progress in helping these students since I was in 9th grade. I should mention that I was in 9th grade in the 1960’s… I saw, and was even involved in many of these same sorts of interactions with teachers and students then… This is not necessarily caused by socio-economics, race, family structure, of standard methods of evaluating intelligence. Most of the students I knew then and a few I just met have one major topic in common with each other… They all have (or had) real problems trusting the people in charge, they had problems with their teacher’s motivations and intentions.
This is not some sort of an indictment upon any teaches as more of a description of some pretty common place teenage angst. I would imagine that these sorts of problems were known in ancient Greece…actually everywhere there have been teenagers. It seems rather pathetic that we have an education system in place where these sorts of behavior and attitudes are seen as surprising.
These sorts of adolescent behavior take occur in places other than schools… Almost any strictly hierarchical society deals with these problems pretty effectively (e.g. tribal societies, even the military!). In time, I expect to hear a lot more about this, if only as a consequence to the fact that there is a growing dis-synchrony in outcomes between boys and girls school performance. Ultimately this topic might cause the education establishment to do something…maybe in the way that they took the problem of implicit sexism in schools (towards girls) as something to fix.
