Parents believe that sending their children to school is the best thing for them, and they’re sent off each morning with the best intentions. They believe that formal education is what children need to become productive and happy in adulthood. But is this really the case? Conventional wisdom says that more money and a more challenging curriculum, along with better teachers, would solve the issues in public schools at the moment. But what if the real problem is the school itself? The fact many people may not be accepting is that school as an institution is failing children today, and society as a result.
Children are required to be in school and as a result of that, their freedom is greatly restricted – far more, in most cases, than most adults would tolerate in their workplaces. In recent decades, adults have been compelling children to spend even more time in a school setting, and there’s now been evidence to prove that it’s damaging many children psychologically. Children naturally learn better in conditions outside of those such as school, where they can learn with more enthusiasm and on a deeper level. Compulsory education has become a fixture of our culture for several generations, and more and more people are attaching to the concept of longer school days and years. People assume that the way schools are developed now has emerged from scientific evidence of how children learn, but this isn’t the case.
Schools are more a product of history than research, and the blueprint for them was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children how to read the Bible without questioning it, and to teach them to automatically obey authority without questioning it. But when these schools were taken over by the government, and as a result made compulsory, the basic structure never changes and the methods of teaching remained unchanged. The teach and test method is spurred on by a system of rewards and punishments, rather than by a real desire to know about the subject in question, and this isn’t the best way to learn – certainly not in children who should have more enthusiasm to learn on a deeper level. We need only look to some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and innovators, many of which left school early or said they never enjoyed it, from Edison to Einstein, to see that children learn in different ways. One size fits all-teaching doesn’t help the majority of students find their passion in life.
As a society, we tend to ignore findings such as these, and yet we’re not surprised that children are unhappy in schools. Much research has gone into this sort of subject and a lot of that has come back to show that people of all ages learn best when they’re self-motivated and are looking into answers of questions they themselves have a yearning to know. Learning in such a way is joyful, not forced. This is proven in early age, when children grown through their own efforts to learn to speak, jump and run, through their own desire to learn. Why are schools not encouraging this way of learning more, rather than forcing them to learn about things they have no desire for? In order to make children as happy as they can be, without hindering their learning ability, schools need to latch on to what children enjoy and how they learn, rather than using the system that’s been in place for so long out of nothing more than habit.
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