Beyond School

[Bill Farren posts his third weekly installment on Education for Well-Being (the full series: my intro “Beyond ‘Did You Know?’ - A Video for Viral Times: ‘Did You Ever Wonder?’“; Bill’s first guest-post, “Education for Well-Being“; Bill’s second guest-post, “The Hidden Curriculum“; and Seoul sophomore Patrick Nam’s outstanding podcast interview with Bill for Project Global Cooling). Bill has vital things to say about education, and I'm happy to read more of them in this post. An overdue hat-tip to Jeffrey Dungan in the Dominican Republic for connecting Bill and me.-- Clay]

I’d like to preface this post with something unrelated (but way more important)–An Irish toast to Clay and his wife: May you both live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live. Congratulations!

Random Acts of Deceleration

Attempts to decelerate the lives of young people seem to be few and far between. When any significant attempt is made, it is so rare and goes against the grain at such a sharp angle, that it makes national headlines. The New York Times wrote an article about the efforts of principal Paul Richards to address the issue of academic stress at his high school. Mr. Richards states that he is trying to “bring the culture to a healthier place.” For this, according to the article, he has been mocked by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Jay Leno. He has received hate mail from all parts.

While reading Dangerously Irrelevant, I came across this reply to a post about the documentary 2 Million Minutes:

As a senior citizen of a fairly affluent suburb of Boston, I have been shocked at the recent changes taking place in our town’s high school. No homework over vacations; no or little homework over long weekends; no required reading over summers and no publication anywhere of the high school honor roll. However, the super-jocks on all high school sports teams are always written about in the local paper. It’s disgraceful!

Academic achievement has become irrelevant. Our high school principal believes kids already have too much “pressure.” He cites several high school suicides in recent years and blames them on pressure to achieve high grades. [School officials, according to the NYT article, emphasize the suicides were not related to stress.] As a result, our high school has been dumbed down to mediocre, where it will stay until we get rid of our current school committee, superintendent and high school principal - all the while wasting over 50% of the town’s tax revenue on the school system.

Finally, our town’s high school certainly doesn’t appear on U.S. News’ list of the best 100 high schools in the U.S., but 3 towns within 10 miles do, as well as does The Boston Latin School.

(Background: 2 Million Minute’s site asks, “How do most American high school students spend this time? What about students in the rest of the world? How do family, friends and society influence a student’s choices for time allocation? What implications do their choices have on their future and on a country’s economic future?”)

In another random act of deceleration, Harvard Dean Harry Lewis made national headlines when he sent out a letter asking students to slow down, have fun, and reflect on what would truly make them happy in life. It’s disconcerting that students considered paragons of what our educational systems have to offer need to be reminded to have fun and to reflect on what might make them happy in life. That the whole purpose of life can be an afterthought needing a reminder, makes one wonder what happened in the 6 million minutes prior to college. I applaud Dean Lewis for his efforts but at the same time wonder about the system and culture that creates a need for such a letter. Our culture seems to have accepted that stress, unhappiness and distaste for learning is the price worth paying for that ill-defined concept called success.

But I don’t believe we have to enter into such an insolvent arrangement. What is now called hard work and higher standards is too often just an indication of how much suffering students are willing to put up with in dealing with boring, schooly, meaningless lessons in very controlling environments. In the process, we are creating a generation of stressed-out, materialistic and miseducated students, to borrow from the title of Denise Pope’s book.

The better bargain involves removing the speed and stress caused by school by removing the schooliness. My observations point to schoolines as a prime source of stress, speed, and wasted learning opportunities. If we were to remove schooliness and replace it with unschooliness, then well-being and learning would quickly improve for students. Life and work would improve markedly for teachers, parents and administrators as well.

I’m afraid though, what schools often suggest as remedies to stress, burnout, disengagement and “playing the system” (cheating), deal mostly, in very schooly ways, with the symptoms and not the underlying causes. Take cheating for example. Most schools see the student as the source of the problem. In an article about the importance of looking at the context in which students act, Alfie Kohn states, “cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on ‘rigor.’” He goes on to say that, “when students perceive that the ultimate goal of learning is to get good grades, they are more likely to see cheating as an acceptable, justifiable behavior”. Most schools, instead of reflecting on what they are doing to cause cheating, throw out a bunch of schooly solutions like using turnitin.com, giving anti-cheating workshops, all the while creating ever more policies and punishments for cheating. Similarly, health texts for students often deal with the issue of stress by correctly suggesting exercise, eating well, and relaxation techniques, but never question the underlying causes of school-related stress. In these obtuse, unreflective environments, stress and speed are bound to thrive.

So, what would happen if we slowed the treadmill down? Would it all unravel? Would students learn less? Would their lives be diminished?

Clearly, it’s an uphill and often thankless struggle to slow down the lives of students today. The belief that faster, harder, and more, produces better learning, will not go away easily. Whether it produces better lives, both in the present and in the future, is seldom asked. Fortunately, as the NYTimes article suggests, small inroads are being made both in the parent community and in the culture at large to improve mental health and school climate.

(I’d like to thank Clay for birthing ¹, elevating, and expanding the idea of schooliness. Once we are aware of it, start to reflect on it, then act to remove it, schools will become more capable instruments of well-being.)

Thanks for reading,

Bill Farren

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