School sucks and what we should be doing about it
School sucks.
You know it does. I mean I grew up hating school. It was most often boring, uneventful and lacked relevance.
I’m willing to bet that you might agree with me. I wanted to find out if people had similar school experiences to mine so I went to one of the most reputable sources I could find: Reddit. Here is what I found:
Redditt was clear. People do not like school. But I couldn’t stop there, so I decided to further my research. On my way through a Google search, I stumbled across something striking. People didn’t just find school boring, pointless, and tedious. It actually made them feel bad, depressed and sad.
As an educator with more than 10 years of experience in the field, I’ve interacted with thousands of students. I can tell you that many students today feel similar to what you just saw [and are about to see].
I think I know why so many people, especially students, feel this way. They are attending school as a part of a system that was never built for them.
Now most of us attended school in what’s called the industrial school system. The Industrial school system moves kids through it like an assembly line. You go from elementary school to middle school to high school then on to college and after that hopefully, you get a good job making enough money to pay Sally Mae back all that money you borrowed. And you know she ALWAYS comes to collect. Kids today still go to school in industrial model schools.
Let’s just be real here. We know that school isn’t working. We know that the system is unfair. We know that students of color and low-income students don’t have the same outcomes from the school system as white and wealthy students. We know that the one-size-fits-all, assembly-line, cookie-cutter approach to education does not work. We know that the education system is old, tired and played out. Yet, we’ve been doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You know what they call that? Insanity.
So its about time we do something different in schools. A fresh look and a new mindset is the only way for us to get off of the assembly line and create schools that serve students well. If we keep thinking and doing the same thing about school, we will continue to build schools that…well…suck.
Schools should be environments that kids love coming to. This means that learning spaces should be designed so that kids love to be there.
Design and architecture can tell you a lot about a place and the people in it. I recently visited the Google offices in Downtown Austin with some students. We were all in awe of the three restaurants, gyms, kitchens on each floor, massage studios, a dog park, and full ping pong competition courts. As we passed Googlers and watched them in their normal work environment, one of my students said, “I can tell people like being here. I mean who wouldn’t love working here? They’ve got Super Smash Bro’s.” We could all see that Google was intentionally designed for its employees to love being there.
When was the last time someone said that about a school building?
This is an industrial-era classroom from 1900.
Industrial era schools had a goal to create effective workers, not happy students. They emphasized conformity, repetition, rote memorization, and never allow kids to question authority. Naturally, the design of the school building supported these purposes.
Unfortunately, classrooms have not changed since. From 1900 to 2020 classrooms have largely looked the same. This is something I call the 100-year tragedy.
I work at a school called Alpha that is rethinking learning spaces. When people walk into our building they often call it WeWork for kids. While I know no one wants to be like WeWork right now, what they are saying is that we are a school with wide-open workspaces and kids who work at their own pace.
There is nothing industrial or traditional about our building. No classrooms, no principal’s office, no lockers or school assembly hall. In fact, one of our buildings is the historic La Zona Rosa building in downtown Austin.
Alpha is designed intentionally as a kid space. Kids can work anywhere in the building, can move furniture around and, when they give us feedback on the way we are using the building, we listen. Outside of a staff restroom, there are no adult-only spaces at Alpha. No teacher’s lounge or staff breakroom or staff offices. We work right alongside kids.
As an educator, working at Alpha has stretched me and taught me to think differently about school spaces. If you are trying to design a space kids love, you have to expand your mind and think differently about what a school building should look like.
To create schools that serve kids well, we have to stop lecturing and let kids learn at their own pace!
A 2017 Washington Post article called “It puts kids to sleep but teachers keep lecturing anyway,” mentions that, although teachers defend lectures as a teaching tool, data doesn’t support that. The article mentions that “failure rates on examination performance under traditional lecture increase by 55% over rates observed by active learning experiences.”
Another study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science reported that Undergraduate students in classes featuring traditional lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail that class. We could keep going, but this is a TEDx talk and I don’t have that much time.
Lecture is the one-size-fits-all approach to learning. Every kid must move at the same pace as the teacher or else! Kids who are ahead are discouraged from moving on without the teacher. Kids who are struggling to often struggle in silence or act out to cope with the stigma of being the dumb kid.
The traditional school system is reliant on rote memory and regurgitation of facts. If you don’t learn enough facts by the time the state standardized test rolls around, you’re in trouble. This cannot and is not what is best for students.
In truth, kids should be able to learn at their own pace.
So how can kids learn at their own pace? Brace yourselves…Teachers STOP teaching. *GASP* I know, I know, but don’t get up and leave.
Consider this. We live in the age of the internet where information or facts are readily available to us all and there’s actually an app for everything. So if school is spent lecturing so that kids memorize facts for a test, you are teaching them as if the internet does not exist.
Siri knows more history than any human needs to know. Alexa can do math faster than anyone in this room. Google knows the capitals to every state and country in the world. Cortana…well let’s leave Microsoft’s Cortana out of this for now..she needs a little extra time.
I strongly believe that the answer to this issue is for teachers to stop fighting against technology and use it in a way you may not have considered in the classroom.
Remember I said there is an app for everything? There are even apps that teach academic courses like Math, Science, Reading, and Language. And they work. I see it every day.
I have four kids, ages 5, 4, 2, and 1. While I’m at work, my beautiful and amazing wife, Alex, runs a pre-school homeschool program JUST by using adaptive learning apps to teach our kids to count, recognize letters, do math and learn to trace. All on an iPad. All at their own pace. They LOVE it! The app they use, Khan Academy Kids, gamifies the learning for them so they think learning is fun. And my wife Alex teaches no academics. What she does do is motivate and encourage the kids to keep going when they get stuck or frustrated.
So the app teaches, and the teacher motivates and coaches.
We decided to try this after a year of me seeing it every day at work. At Alpha, we use adaptive learning apps to handle the academic portion of school. Kids at Alpha love the apps as well. More than loving it, the apps work for them.
On the MAPS skills test, which over 8 million American students take each year, 65% of Alpha students that have been with us for a year or more, score in the 90th percentile on one or more academic subjects. 23% of them score in the 99th percentile.
We have reimagined a way for kids to learn at their own pace and still achieve at a high level!
There is no perfect teaching method. If you are looking for that you won’t find it. But there is a way to constantly find and evolve methods to suit the learners that are in front of us. THAT is how we create schools that serve kids well.
As a student, I often asked my teachers, “When will I need to know this when I grow up?”
Yep. I was that kid.
One time I asked my 4th-grade teacher why I had to learn cursive and typing in the same school year. She told me I’d need typing for my resume and cursive to write letters.
When I asked my 7th grade English teacher why I needed to memorize MLA format instead of using easybib.com she told me that the internet might not be around forever.
I once asked my Algebra 1 teacher why I needed to learn Algebra. I mean, I was good with PEMDAS as the pinnacle of my math career but she said, “Mike you have to learn Algebra because you won’t have a calculator with you when you grow up.
I hated school growing up for two primary reasons:
- I didn’t believe my teachers were teaching me relevant information.
- I had no interest in what I was learning. I had no input or control over what I learned.
If we want to create schools that serve kids well we have to give kids control over their own learning.
One of the biggest reasons school sucks is because schools are often designed completely by adults with no kid input. Pop into any school faculty meeting or planning meeting. You’ll often hear, “Oh the kids will love this.” And most of the time, they are DEAD WRONG.
As adults and educators, we should have enough humility to know that we don’t always have the right answers. And on the subject of school: Kids are the experts.
One of the most difficult, yet rewarding moments of my career as an educator happened to me last year. I’d planned this trip for my students. I thought they would love it. We were going to see this giant telescope, play with some virtual reality and learn about augmented reality.
After coming back from the trip I casually asked one of the students, “Hey, how was the trip.” She looked at me and said, “I’m going to be honest. This wasn’t fun. I really didn’t learn much. It was actually kind of lame. Really lame actually. I wouldn’t do that again.” And I felt like she was trying to let me down easy on that one.
But I did the hard thing and asked, “how do we make it better?” Then the kids and the staff actually came together and planned a trip that they did love.
Now don’t pat me on the back for this. I begrudgingly asked for feedback because I’ve learned to do this as a part of the culture of my workplace. One of the parts of Alpha I am most proud of is the fact that we ask kids to audit everything we do. If they don’t like it, we will often change it.
It takes kid input to create schools that kids love. It takes kid input to create schools that serve kids well. Kids are not customers in school, they should be shareholders.
Is this easy? No. It is a hard shift in mindset and action. But it is more than worth it.
For many of us, seeing is believing. So I challenge you to go and see. School can be special and amazing. It does not have to be one-size-fits-all. There are amazing schools that are fighting to create phenomenal environments for kids.
My challenge to you is to go visit them. Go and see the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, Georgia. Go see High Tech High in San Diego. Go Check out Tacoma School of the Arts in Tacoma Washington. Come check out Alpha right here in Austin, Texas.
I believe deeply that conversations like this can be the catalyst for real, impactful change in education. We have to push ourselves to think differently and act differently if we want to create schools that serve kids well.
If kids really are the future, we should make sure they aren’t learning in schools of the past.
School sucks. But it doesn’t have to.
