Our Schools Are On Life-Support
And so are the children we feed into our violent, broken system
As a surly and rebellious teen who refused to stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance in her high school classroom, a sin punishable by one-day suspension in Texas, I had some very decided opinions on what constituted “liberty and justice” for all.
In my view, liberty and justice were not being equitably distributed. These convictions were challenged by my sophomore algebra teacher, a pale, bird-like woman who told her students, me included, that women were subordinate to men because they’d been created from the rib bone of Adam.
“But wasn’t Adam made of dust?” I asked her, quivering from the insult offered to us so publicly. “Last time I checked, bone is a lot stronger than dust.”
So, it was off to the vice principal’s office. Again. I spent a lot of time there being shown papers that detailed the “appalling discrepancy” between my grades and my IQ. The vice principal was this guy in a sports coat and birth-control glasses named Mr. Halbert who, perhaps because of the glasses, possessed X-ray vision. He could always tell whether I was wearing a bra. If I wasn’t—and trust me, I wasn’t—he sent me home to get one.
Who could blame me for not coming back?
After an ill-fated tryst with an older delinquent who’d actually blown up the vice principal’s office, like any misguided teen, I took up with an alcoholic concert pianist/trust fund kid named Evans, also older, whose deep voice made it easy to pose as my father (long dead) to get me out of school. “Stacey’s not feeling well,” he’d rumble over the phone. “She’s not coming in today.” And then we’d drive two hours to the beach, to a museum, to his house, where I received an education of a different sort.
I hated school with the heat of a thousand suns, and it is likely that sentiment was returned tenfold. There was no place for me. My abysmal grades excluded me from the academic set. I wasn’t a stoner, a cheerleader, an athlete, or pep-squad material. To me, football players were mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging troglodytes who received special treatment just for running a ball down a field. I actively plotted their deaths. I wasn’t rich. I wasn’t trendy. I wasn’t cool. I loved theater, but the theater director was an ass. I was a stranger in a strange land whose sole joy was finding a way not to go to school.
When it came to attendance—and keep in mind, those were different days—I pushed my luck all the way to the edge, skipping every day I could legally skip without being kept back a grade. No way I was doing that again, not with the 7:45 AM homerooms, the PE classes where I had to undress in front of a whole room of bitchy girls, the casual misogyny of Coach Berman leering at Paige Silenski’s breasts. I saw everything: the hypocrisy, the inappropriate lust, the adult cluelessness, the attempted brainwashing. And I can’t even say my hostility stemmed from being an outsider. It was being forced to do what I didn’t want to do for eight hours a day, five days a week, which was sitting at a desk and learning absolutely nothing.
It’s a violence we do to youth, this passive and sadistic form of “education.” We urge them to sit and listen when all a teen wants to do is run and yell. Subjects like science, geometry, algebra, trigonometry shouldn’t be inflicted discriminately on everyone, not when grades are involved. Some people, like Yours Truly here, are asymmetrically gifted. We see no purpose in logic theorems or algebra coefficients. We are Zimbabweans in a Chinese laundry, trying to keep from going quietly mad.
But what are the alternatives? Private school, which only a handful of families can afford. Home school, which deprives a teenager of the chance to socialize. Or perhaps something akin to what they have in Finland, a country adjudged to have one of the best educational systems in the world.
In Finland, comprehensive education is given between school years 1 through 9, and is meant for all children, ages 7 to 17. Compulsory education doesn’t start until a child turns 7—a sentiment echoed by my own grandmother who was a lifelong educator in English, especially that taught to the foreign-born. She was firmly of the opinion that boys, in particular, ought not to be formally educated until the age of 9. To force a little boy to sit behind a school desk was nothing short of cruel.
At the end of Finland’s compulsory schooling, each young person must apply for further studies at a university or at a vocational school. There are no mandated standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students' senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. No one is toadying for the kind of grades that might get him into a top-tier university. No one is snorting Adderall to cram for a semester final.
Americans see education as a zero-sum Darwinian bloodbath, winner take all. Suffering is glamorized, rewarded, encouraged. After eight hours of school, there’s three hours of homework. If you haven’t driven yourself into the dirt, you aren’t trying hard enough (is the irony of me writing those words—it’s now 4:30 in the morning—lost on me?). Yet American students continually rank near the middle or bottom among industrialized nations, especially in math and science. That’s because students like me are pulling down the bell curve. The way American schools teach all subjects needs a massive, non-political overhaul.
Since the 1980s, Finnish educators have focused on making these basics a priority:
The purpose of education is to redress social inequality.
All students receive free school meals.
All students have access to healthcare.
Psychological counseling is available to everyone as part of that healthcare.
School starts at 9:00-9:45 A.M., since research shows that earlier start times are detrimental to a student’s well-being.
Fins receive the least amount of homework than any students in the world, and yet they consistently out-perform other cultures that have a toxic work-to-life balance.
15 to 20-minute intervals of unstructured time are given throughout the day.
Here in Italy, that fork in a teen’s road begins a bit earlier. Around the age of thirteen, a student must choose a high school: classics, sciences, human sciences, languages, arts, music/dance. Secondary (high) school is five years, not four, and most students graduate at the age of nineteen. I would have dug out a kidney and sold it on the black market for the opportunity to study what I wanted to study. Heck, I might have even gone to school.
Remembering the torture of high school makes it easy for me to see that some teen drug use likely stems from sheer desperation. How I didn’t go down that road is a miracle. Imagine sitting behind a desk all day where, instead of getting paid to do things that are at least of mild interest to you, things you’re probably good at, you are forced to make potato batteries, recite the periodic table, and play the recorder. Imagine doing this day after day. Imagine being, just by your very existence, an object of wrath to other bored teens who amuse themselves by bullying you. Imagine going to the Vice Principal for help and being reminded, once again, that school policy requires girls to wear a bra. Oh, and by the way, your grades suck.
How long are we going to keep playing this game? How long are we going to keep turning a blind eye to the suffering of young people in the American “educational” system? How long are we going to let the Betsy Devoses of the world defund public schools? How long are we going to allow Christian fundamentalists to preside over our children’s educational boards?
Our lawmakers aren’t going to do anything. Even those that want to, can’t. There’s a lot of money tied up in standardized testing. The SAT has its own lobby.
We alone are going to have to be the change we want to see in this world. It won’t be easy. But everything—and I mean everything—depends on it.
Surely you have opinions about the deplorable state of the American educational system. I want to hear your thoughts. Feel free to leave your comments below.
Excellent points all, but let's face facts. American schools are warehouse, babysitting factories masquerading as educational institutions. What little education is doled out has morphed into indoctrination over the past generation or so. It's not about learning what will help a student be competitive in an increasingly combative global economy. It's about learning what will create reliably compliant Republican Christian soldiers who will do what they're told without question. The oligarchy will need a constant supply of obedient workers who know their place, and that training starts in school. Independent, critical thinking is seen as a threat to the existing order.
I was good at school simply because I was good at memorizing all that shit. But I hated it, too! I loathed standardized testing, what a piece of crap. My SAT indicated I needed basic English in college, but then I aced the college course when I took it.