School sucks (you know it does!) and there’s a reason why
There is a blog in Psychology Today called Freedom to Learn. Its author is Peter Gray. His resume is: "a research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology and author of an introductory psychology textbook, Psychology, now in its 5th edition."
This blog has some very interesting articles. It’s main theme is education, and actually, not education by itself, but a critique of the current educational system and recommendations on how to change it. I was thrilled to find a blog such as this in a magazine with the magnitude of Psychology Today. Mr. Peter Gray expresses some radical opinions that reach a great audience.
The theme of education is something that interests me a lot. The reason is that there are not many years that I ended my own circle of obligatory education and the memories of the whole system are still fresh. And the only thing I can say for sure, is that I haven’t learned a damn thing in school!
I have asked other friends and people about their experiences in school, and I still have to find one person who admits that he remembers anything from it. Most people will recall friends, experiences, girlfriends etc. However, not one will admit that he remembers what he was taught in the math class, and those who admit that they might remember anything, once I ask them to tell me what exactly is this that they remember, they find that they just had an impression that they remembered it.
That impression I believe, is something that is generated by the following series of speculations. We all spend about 10 years in school. So, we should have learned something, shouldn’t we? Well, as it seems, even if we spent 20 years in the educational system, we would still learn nothing.
I always knew that school sucked, but I had never made a large scale research into the subject. Peter Gray, however, does exactly this. He offers evidence, ideas and proposals.
First of all, there is the question as to why school is as it is. As I said before, it is pretty obvious that we learn nothing from it. I believe that the reasons are two and we’ll discuss both of them.
First, school is not a scientific product, or aproduct of logical thought, but rather school is a historical product. Peter Gray discusses this in Why Schools Are What They Are I: A Brief History of Education. As he explains in his post Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers, human children, traditionally, have learned what they needed to learn to survive in their environment, through self-play, exploration and observation of the adults. The change in the educational system and the foundation of schooling came much later.
The invention of agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago in some parts of the world and later in other parts, set in motion a whirlwind of change in people’s ways of living. The hunter-gatherer way of life had been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labor-intensive. To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of the plants and animals on which they depended and of the landscapes within which they foraged. They also had to develop great skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and gathering. They had to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and tracking game. However, they did not have to work long hours; and the work they did was exciting, not dreary. Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between work and play–essentially all of life was understood as play.
Agriculture gradually changed all that. With agriculture, people could produce more food, which allowed them to have more children. Agriculture also allowed people (or forced people) to live in permanent dwellings, where their crops were planted, rather than live a nomadic life, and this in turn allowed people to accumulate property. But these changes occurred at a great cost in labor. While hunter-gatherers skillfully harvested what nature had grown, farmers had to plow, plant, cultivate, tend their flocks, and so on. Successful farming required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labor, much of which could be done by children. With larger families, children had to work in the fields to help feed their younger siblings, or they had to work at home to help care for those siblings. Children’s lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work that was required to serve the rest of the family.
Professor Peter Gray
So, the children had become one more mouth to feed, and thus, they had to work in order to survive. Furthermore, the new historical conditions generated the system of "social classes". Obedience was something that needed to be taught to keep the order as it is. For these reasons, physical punishment was considered a useful means of teaching the principles of feudalism.
Schooling started to be developed from the 16th to the 19th century for reason that Peter Gray describes them as both secular and religious. These were for example the belief of Protestants or american puritans that school must teach the bible so that the souls will be saved. Employers in industry also required schooling for their workers, so that they could read and write and nations required faithful patriots to send to wars. However, there were also scholars who believed in the principle of education.
What all these theories had in common was that children can’t learn anything if left to their own, and they are pretty much like a tabula rasa that should have knowledge inscripted on it by the teachers.
Modern day tabula rasa and modern day engraveling
As schools were created and public education was founded, learning started to be considered as children’s work. The methods used before for obedience, were now used for teaching. The schooling system makes a distinction between play, which is deemed hurtful, and learning, which is considered the child’s main occupation.
The same holds true for today. Children’s time is seperated between "learning-time" and "play-time". Play can come only if the child has finished his homework and learning for the day. Additionaly, school characterizes children. Their grades show if they are "bad" or "good" children. Instead of being beaten they are medicated with ritalin. And all this teaches the children that learning is not play, nor it is something pleasant, but it is a work that must be done. No wonder then, why you’ll see many people have a negative attitude towards learning and books in their adult lives. Peter Gray concludes (and I agree with him) that scientists become scientists, not because of education, but in spite of it. Like Mark Twain had said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
21st century education
What I said about ritalin will take us to the second reason of existence of the current educational system. As Peter Gray explains in the post Why Schools Are What They Are II: Forces Against Fundamental Change, modern day schooling is part of the whole economic structure of current society. A lot of people are making money out of it. School is big business, and should this system change, the teachers, the publishing companies, the pharmaceutical companies, school psychologists and probably many more people, would lose their jobs.
And not only that, we all know that people and societies are many times characterized by a state of inertia. Things remain as they are and nobody cares for it. Peter Gray gives the explanation that people will send their children to schools even if they know that this is wrong, because they don’t want to differ from anyone else, and this is indeed a strong motive as cognitive psychologists know. What I may add, is that people hate school so much, that once they finish with it, they no longer want to have anything to do with it.
Furthermore, the schooling system tries to prove it is right by using cyclical arguments. For example, children think that school is good for them, because it prevents them from playing all day, instead of working. But the notion that work is learning and play is something bad comes from school itself. Furthermore, children might believe that school makes them "good children", because they get good grades, but school is once again the establishment that provides this notion. Furthermore, high paid and high status jobs, require university degrees, and so school grades are connected with what most people consider a good life. But besides that, these arguments do not prove that school really teaches anything. It really looks more than one big feedback loop.
Peter Gray believes that in 50 years from now, the educational system will change to something more like the Sudbury Valley School (Children Educate Themselves IV: Lessons from Sudbury Valley), where children teach themselves in a democratic setting where they are allowed to do as they please, within the boundaries of a set of democratic rules, without any supervision by adults or coercion.
Sudbury Valley School
I myself have some theories on the subject of learning. These theories don’t concern the education of children but the system of higher education. Through my experience through this blog, Encefalus, I came to realize how imporant self-exploration and self-education can be. I created Encefalus because I wanted to use it as an external hard drive of my brain, where I can store my thoughts, and to communicate with people who share similar interests. By surfing the web or, just by thinking about various subjects, I each time find the subject I want to discuss. Because I have to write an article that will be presented in front of the internet audience, I have to put a lot of work into making my thoughts and paragraphs as clear as possible. Furthermore, this can help me find inconsistencies in what I was thinking or develop new ideas, as I see my thoughts written before me. Of course, every article is always accompanied by a little research on my subject. This can range from a simple google search, to a full blown research in Science Direct and Scirus.
So, through Encefalus, I manage to consolidate my thoughts, to learn and to share with others what I have learned or thought. I trully believe that learning through such a means could be introduced into the system of higher education. Imagine for example a class of a 100 psychology students where each one studies and shares his thoughts and ideas. With the current system, one should spend 4 or more years in a university before he can start creating his own theories or make experiments and discoveries. With what I propose, these could happen just by chance, as one student communicates with the other.
This whole theory of education is something that I want to connect with other theories of information I have in my mind, like for example those I have posted before: The Digg Factor: The Digg Phenomenon and a Possible Elementary Model of the Core Processes of Digg, How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this has to do with the Flynn effect, More proof that video games make you smart 
.
So, I hope, like Peter Gray does, that the current system of education will one day be considered harsh and brutal and will be replaced by a system that exists for the student and not solely for the sake of its own existence. Maybe, it’s time to throw away an educational system based on the principles of the Middle Ages.
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:33 pm
Does he also mention about how in the advent of the industrial revolution, laws ended up being made that disallowed child factory labor, and schools were created in order to keep children in a supervised locale during working hours? also schools were geared towards creating complacent factory workers by teaching obedience to authority.
October 9th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Yes, Peter Gray’s articles are fully analytical, and they include the subjects you just mentioned.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:00 am
SCHOOL SUCKS!
Great post. I too dream of a day when the education system is reformed into a practical one and fun one that really encourages learning.
There are just so many things with school that are fundamentally horribly wrong.
One example, classes are often spread over a full semester or year, with classes two or more times a week, and with that class lasting hours. And with almost no teaching going on. For example, I attend a Spanish class for about 2.5 hours twice week in college. Almost nothing is taught. The majority of the time is just filled with stupid cultural stuff and boring and inefficient Spanish language games that don’t really help much. Then we are told to go home, read from a ridiculously un-intuitively-written $150 dollar text book (i.e. teach ourselves), and do some boring homework. Not only is this not specialized to the student, what I always end up doing is getting the information from studyspanish.com and spending five or ten minutes mastering whatever we were supposed to study. So why can’t we just do all our learning in class? Maybe a couple 1-hour classes a week spread over a couple months with no homework? That would do the trick!
It is also stupid that people are supposed to do like 4 different subjects in one semester. Because what happens is that your mind gets divided focuses. If there would be only one or two classes that are taught in an efficient way, in like a one or two month period, that would be much better.
Another example is a typography class I was looking at. Spending three hours twice a week for five months is one way of learning typography. Spending two days reading about it in some “For Dummies” book would accomplish the same goal. But alas, degrees are needed for jobs when resourcefulness and knowledge aren’t looked at.
And what’s the deal with textbooks? In High School I had all these textbooks that I never read. They took forever to explain something in a really sloppy way. I bought cliffs notes (which are very cheap compared to textbooks), and spend 5 pages in one of those for what’s covered in 25 textbook pages. IS THERE SOME LAW THAT SAYS SCHOOLS CAN’T USE CLIFFS NOTES AS COURSE MATERIAL?!
Of course, there are larger fundamental problems that, if solved, would render the above problems irrelevant. But you see the stupidity.
I HATE SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I LOVE LEARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WHY CAN’T THERE BE A REVOLUTION OR REFORMATION TO ALIGN THE TWO?
December 9th, 2008 at 3:05 am
I’d like to pose some questions to flesh out exactly what works and doesn’t work for different students. I want students’ needs and ideas to play a prominent role in my decisions as a teacher. I find that the more feedback I get, and can show to school officials, the more support I get to teach with a student-centered approach.
Is there a way I could connect with students, or recent students, using this website to get this feedback?
December 12th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Leslie Tortuga,
If you want to contact me about this, just send me an e-mail
December 14th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I’m curious.
If you remember absolutely nothing from school, as you said, how can you write this blog? Or do basic math, like when you go shopping? (OK, you can relay on a calculator for the math thin.)
What I mean is that not remembering the classes does not mean that you didn’t learn.
I know it may sound pedant, but since you said you are still to find someone how remembers what they learned in school, I can’t say you found him. I do remember a lot of stuff I learned in school. I remember how to read and write (better in my mother language than in English), I remember how to do basic math, and calculus, how to create, read and interpret a graph; a lot of stuff of history and geography (you can ask for concrete examples if you think it is just an impression of remembering history and geography). As for college, I remember even better, I learned electronics, advanced math, programming and I grant you that I still do remember most of these things.
Maybe what is being proposed works for people from humanities, but I strongly disagree that it would work for people from sciences and engineering.
December 14th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Well, Jefferson, surely you got a strong argument there. I must agree with you on knowledge that could be described as overly “concrete” like math and geografy. Mathematics require a lot of practice and practice in a field is usually boring
. So, mathematics (as well as reading and writing), is something that maybe should be taught when you are younh, so that you just develop the skills you might need to use when you get older.
However, the problems I tried to discuss about in this article, are not solely educational, but political and social, as well. We must think what the education tries to achieve. Casting aside really basic stuff, what has the school offered you outside of the current socio-economical system that tries to survive its existence, pretty much like a biological organism? And furthermore, is the current way of learning optimal?
I too agree that I learned a few things from school, but, honestely, I think that most of the time there was wasted. Now, that I am in the university, I feel that I can spend my time more productively, since the free time I now have can help me learn things that in school I couldn’t, not because of ability, but because of time-constraint and exhaustion.
September 4th, 2009 at 11:16 pm
School sucks? Of course it does. There is a revolution going on already folks-it’s called unschooling or open source learning. People everywhere are learning from the abundance that is already out there. No body can give you an education; you have to take one,” says John Taylor Gatto who by the way says all that Gray says but in a much more eloquent and exciting way. Try reading his Dumbing us down for starters. There is also John Holt who said all this 40 years ago just as powerfully. Ivan Illich, and Paul Goodman are other guys who started the questioning of mass schooling and schooling and a schooled society. I am happy that mainstream media is finally catching up.
radiofreeschool.blogspot.com
October 5th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
OMG halerious i took a pic of it n put it as a wall paper love it!
December 20th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
thanke you so mach , i hate scho0ol…
January 26th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
I hate skool?
January 26th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
I hate skool? Becuz ppl got sumthang to say abt u? Skool can kiss my Azz? Becuz I have alot of hater on my bacc? So just get off my back beucz if u get in my face that it? Its on an poppin????
January 28th, 2010 at 6:42 pm
My Boyfriend just fucking just not being fun. i hugged him last night and he just pulls it all away. And i am so fucking Pissed off because of him i really don’t like him now, i love him but he really don’t like me or the fat people are that is around, that makes me super pissed off. if i were you don’t hit them it is illeagle to hit people i got called on the police and i had 2 tickets and i had to go to Fucking court. which really made me super mad, i thought i was going to jail. and i thought that was retarded. like seriously. if i find him right by My friend Alyssa’s i found him and i had pressure to love him so much. i wanted him to be my BF for months and i hate to be not to be loved
March 20th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
I’m sorry but I’d have to say your arguments against school have very little basis in reality. Maybe it’s different in Canada, but I’m confidant that i still remember most of what I learned in class. In elementary school I was struggling with math, so they pulled me aside and put me in Special Ed, were I WAS given individualized attention and moved through three years of material in a year. I was placed in advanced math and science in high school. Most of the problems expressed here can be attributed to the attitude of the student, not the system. If your just going to school so you can hang out with your friends, that is all thats going to be accomplished, if you go to learn, ask questions, and complete your work you will be better for it for the rest of your life.
March 22nd, 2010 at 12:55 am
Then it must be better in canada.
April 23rd, 2010 at 7:19 am
SCHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS EVERYTHING -..–
IPBAND ME I AM ON THE FUCKING SCHOOL :>
April 23rd, 2010 at 7:21 am
SCHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS EVERYTHING -..
April 23rd, 2010 at 7:21 am
SCHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKS EVERYTHING -..–
IPBAND ME I AM ON THE FUCKING SCHOOL :>
from Rom
April 23rd, 2010 at 7:22 am
Modern day tabula rasa and modern day engraveling
As schools were created and public education was founded, learning started to be considered as children’s work. The methods used before for obedience, were now used for teaching. The schooling system makes a distinction between play, which is deemed hurtful, and learning, which is considered the child’s main occupation.
The same holds true for today. Children’s time is seperated between “learning-time” and “play-time”. Play can come only if the child has finished his homework and learning for the day. Additionaly, school characterizes children. Their grades show if they are “bad” or “good” children. Instead of being beaten they are medicated with ritalin. And all this teaches the children that learning is not play, nor it is something pleasant, but it is a work that must be done. No wonder then, why you’ll see many people have a negative attitude towards learning and books in their adult lives. Peter Gray concludes (and I agree with him) that scientists become scientists, not because of education, but in spite of it. Like Mark Twain had said: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
schhool sucks from marie norway
July 6th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
At the risk of being a little long here. I’ve been thinking about starting a school myself at this point.
I was a person who did very well in school. 99% percentile. Went to college and got an computer science degree.. High IQ, (blah, blah. ) So I’m a “success” per se by many society standards.
School taught me basic skills, but rarely gave me context on when to use them, how to or why I really should care. It was a rare class that taught me to think for myself.
School:
- Didn’t teach me how to live.
- Often taught me principles that are contrary to the real world.
- In engineering school, I was supposed to do my assignments alone. This is exactly the opposite of what you try to do in the real world. you don’t try to reinvent the wheel unless you need to.
– You take a course, fail it. You take it again, and they average the grade. point is you learned it. There was a reason that MIT was pass/no credit during some of it’s time. The issue is whether you learned it or not and how well you learned it, not whether you failed the first time.
- Didn’t deal or address social issues of interpersonal relationships, which are essential for being successful
- Didn’t deal with emotional intelligence and understanding that we are making judgements and decisions about life that have lasting consequences
- Didn’t teach about choice and consequences in a supportive way.
- Teach little to nothing about money and how to really make it. Hint – a job (pay for time) is not the final goal here.
- Didn’t provide tools to deal with the job market
- Didn’t teach about life and how it changes over time as you age.
The point being, that school should prepare us for the “real world” very well. It should prepare us in a way that doesn’t overly coddle us. It should teach us that you can fail and just get right back up and try again. It should teach about consequences, but provide a safety net in the early stages as it helps to build confidence and teach people how to fail gracefully. It should provide a place for children to explore and provide guidance on how to discover their strengths.
Certainly some basic math and language skills are important, but the manner in which they are taught only work for a small part of the population. No animal sits down as a desk while it’s mother teaches it something. We are using only our higher functions and disconnecting the experiences. Courses that had you try to accomplish a task and then tought you the tools to accomplish it as you go would teach
>>>The best way to learn is to actually try and perfrom tasks or accomplish goals and give people the tools to complete those.
You can create games or other artificial exercises to help in this endevour, but work on the actual task. Expose patterns and practices that have worked for others in the past, then step back and give kids room. Provide guidance on the way to the goal. Deal with interpersonal issues and emotional issues as they come up. Expose what works in life and teach how to own your own life.
For example,
– if you want to teach about math and when you would use it – How would you hold up a person with playing cards? What do you need to know to accomplish task? How do you figure it out?
– If you want to teach history, bring up current events where a negative or positive thing has occurred. Looks back in history for other patterns.
– If you want to teach finances, play monopoly or other games that similute the stock market. Bring in Cash Flow from Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Some will take to these games and some will not. The key to find exercises that work for these different types.
If school was even 1/10th of this, it would go a lot further towards giving people the skills they really need in life and moving society and the world forward towards some of the more utopian visions many of us think should exist, but which seem impractical given the state of the world.
August 18th, 2010 at 1:30 pm
Dear people,
I see that idea’s or diffused from reality. Some of you give their experiences. Others hatch into these experiences and others argument they need more votes and people to back up an other approach. Your just messing around. The people are divided by greed.
Since i was 3 years old i started to rebel against learning color pattern’s. (which indirectly leads to racism) The names they given different colors. (for example i like brown or i like honey because it’s yellow) I started to rebel against reading in quit. (disengaging an own opinion) Because that’s way to create an own fantasy world. But besides that a fantasy is something close to a hidden agenda. Everything you read gives you negative or positive feedback. But since you read quietly you keep idea’s about what you think a lot to yourself. These are some fundamentals i rebelled against.
Some teachers saw what was happening at this time and they interfered when i was a little boy. They started to be tyrannical against me. Which is awful behavior against a little child. Suggesting to the other kids they could pick on me and making public fun of what they called my flaws. Hypocritical because they couldn’t see their own pay-check greed inside there own eyes.
Therefor i spent a lot of years in suffering the horrors of a school system. Eventually i dropped to the lowest grade. Like many other kids do who are not obedient against a system they do not yet know or understand. (until today)
After high school i went to college. It took me several years to reinforce myself and to come back from some horrors i met in high school. (mental and physical damages. Try to live more then 15 years in a environment where everyday hunderds of people project hate upon you.)
I started to be excellent in studying but didn’t belong in a place where i had horrifying experiences. Excellent grades where the other side of the medallion for me. But i started to see the seriousness of what i had been through in high school and started to see that this college was doing the same in a more sneaky way of giving good interest this time. I been smashed over the ground and a lot of things where taken away from me before. And again it happened when they noticed i saw more of what was happening. I started to get a view not over my own path but also over the path of thousands of young children and young students. I almost took away my own life because there was haresment involved outside the school.
Teachers even suggest to the people of my dorm to harass and terrify me every day. Including breaking into my personal life and embarrassing experiences.
These days i recognize school systems or any other systems of keeping people in line just to keep them obedient to social order and capitalistic principles. If your don’t, everything is taken away from you. Even threats are hold against you or members of your family. Besides that thousands of other institutions try to make your life a living hell. You cant sleep, eat or even live without feeling a threat that can be caused against you. So far that you almost feel like you need to kill yourself. The reason why a lot of students kill themselves.
I learned to educate myself. I learned decent English and i learned different psychological mechanism’s that this world has enclosed in itself. It’s a horror to every kid, a death or a putting to sleep of what they really are and what they really think. Creating people with more then one face, but the one that’s screaming all the time is the one left behind without a voice to speak, creating all kinds of illnesses witch are good for thousands of jobs to create to.
And as the person who wrote this suggested. We create jobs out of misery and keep working till we drop and paradoxically. We react lazy to this type of shit and therefore we need to keep working harder en harder each day. Because where creating a loop that will cost us in labor and not life years.
Now keep on discussing bullshit… I already told the bullies to sit and to listen to what i have learned through 20 years of misery. This time I’m indulging myself to be an open book about the flaws of books and school which earn ton’s of money expressing idea’s from idiots who do not care about your pain, neither mine. But relax neither do i myself.
Greets.