Drive?

I saw this video from RSA Animate earlier today, and it really struck a chord. Even though the video was intended to target audiences in the corporate world, I have seen the total disconnect between reward and performance very often in myself and many of my friends in the strikingly similar situation so many students find themselves in today. The people that succeed the most in school are the people who are personally motivated in class- they like the teacher and don't want to disappoint them, they take pride in being the best or better than others, or they are held accountable to highly motivated parents who will not let them take risks with their transcripts. Rarely, at least in my experience, have I found that these students spend countless hours doing busywork simply because they actually enjoy a class. At many levels, the stress levels required to prepare for the standardized tests that monopolize class time make it impossible to slow down or bask in the beauty of learning. This is identical to the effect described by the video, where focus on economic success prevents inspiration, the only difference being that in school, students are too preoccupied with grades to learn or learn to enjoy learning, which has many more long-term negative effects.

Unfortunately, there are many students, at least as far as my experience has gone, that do not really care about the teacher's opinion of them, do not feel the need to compete for grades, and do not enjoy the majority of the classes they chose, or more often, were required to take. Although I often find myself lagging and questioning the "why" behind everything involved in the school "process," I am able to manufacture in myself a sort of synthetic motivation that gets me through, however frustrating it sometimes feels. However, in tasks that fulfill the three requirements put forth in the video (autonomy, mastery, and purpose, for those who didn't watch), my "less motivated" friends and I become much more productive than we would ever have expected, staying up until the early hours of dawn to finish some program we felt like making, or simply debating the merits of privatized health care or funding for NASA.

Apologies.

My apologies for the lack of activity in this blog. Right after I created it, I was hit by a perfect storm of college stuff I needed to do, exams, planning an internship and various other personal things that completely sucked away my time and made it difficult to work up the energy to write something here. However, now I have finished the AP exams, prepared what I need so far for college, and am interning with the author of A Purpose Linked Organization, working on developing a student tool. It's certainly been an interesting few months, and this internship is proving to be very rewarding. I don't have much time today, because I need to get back to work, but at some point later in the week I'll try to post something a little more insightful and interesting to read.

Apologies,
Fabian

I submitted this short essay to my school's newspaper, and it got a lot of positive feedback. What are your thoughts on it?

Why not allow children to study what they want to study, for their entire school careers? Obviously, there are many fundamental skills that must be taught, such as the ability to read and write, but these do not require many years or excessive exercise to understand, and can be perfected without the necessity to relegate reading and writing to a single subject. After these skills are learned, why continue regulating the students, limiting their fields of study, forcing them to look at broad subjects in detail, and then test them on it?

Today's educational systems seem to have a fascination with imposing harsher and harsher “standards,” increasing the amount of state-mandated materials that students must memorize, and decreasing the ability of the students to truly find pleasure in the quest for knowledge that schools claim to support. School may succeed in prepping children to pass their SOLs, or high school students to do well on the SAT, but the schools fail utterly in the end, stressing their students and managing to make courses that should be incredibly fascinating and eye-opening, such as chemistry or literature, into endless sessions of lecture and assessment, the teacher droning on, discussing specific problems or quotations that students will not remember by the end of the year.

The miracle of schools is that they manage to destroy this natural curiosity, overtly present in the kindergarten or below classes, with children literally begging to know why the sky is blue, or why birds can fly. Instead of working with this early intellectual curiosity, schools attempt to harness it, turning it away from the subjects that the students profess an interest in, and instead forcing them to read, year after year, the same quotations from George Washington, or send it slowly trawling through random historical fact, emphasizing points that the textbook recommends be emphasized, ignoring the dying hunger for knowledge that lurks behind every student watching the clock tick by, slowly, praying for the minute escape can be made, and enjoyment can once again be found in fanciful games in the playground.

Complaints of “apathy in the classroom” are commonplace, and as a response, initiatives are proposed to increase standards, to ensure that every student is forced to learn. It is amazing that the same people proposing these tighter standards and increased structure do not realize that they are merely contributing to the problem. If the first thing that pops into a student's mind when they think of the word “science” is a picture of a gray-scale classroom, with a teacher in front carefully watching the students, grading the homework from the night before and making sure that no one is looking up from their test, then obviously “science” is not something they will naturally be able to identify any sort of pleasure with. This is not a result of the rise of distractions, such as the internet or video games, but rather is a result of the release that cannot be found in school, and must instead be satisfied outside of the academic environment. This very quickly teaches children that the fun starts when they exit the classroom. The largest problem with their realization is that they are correct- school is not fun. Children, for the most part, do not enjoy it. Just like their corporate counterparts, students burn out. However, for most, exiting the system is not an option, and so they respond with what is the natural human response to inescapable and constant stress- they recede.

For many students, school becomes an obstacle course, a place where they must jump through the necessary hoops in order to get the rewards they think they want. They spend all their time focusing on getting past the hoops, and nearly no time examining what exists around and inside them. This is not what school should be. Of course, a basic understanding of subjects such as Biology, History, Chemistry or Literature is necessary. However, the word “basic” is extremely important here. Every citizen of the United States does not need to be able to calculate the number of moles of Carbon would be gained from the burning of CO2, but every citizen of the United States should, of course, have a firm grasp of what an atom is, and why it would act the way it does. After this conceptual understanding, specific understanding should not be required. It should, of course, be available, but only to those who wish to know it.

In short, the collapse of education in the United States is not a result of too few regulations, but too many. Education in America should be focused on holistic understanding, and the ability to use this broad base of knowledge to better approach the world. School should be fun, something that children can look forwards to. Students should be motivated to invest themselves emotionally in their schooling. The current system promotes none of this. Students are conditioned to hate the concept of learning, and motivated to separate themselves from their education, in order to deal with the stress it causes.

Hello World!

Hello internet, this is my first post on this particular blog. I created this blog to vent my frustration and offer constructive criticism of the educational system in the US. I hope to combine empirical studies that have been done with my own personal experiences in order to offer my own opinions and solutions regarding the problems we face and their solution, in the hope that someone may read this and agree. It is my opinion that students deserve the same 40 hour workweek as adults, that trade skills must be regarded as legitimate, and trade professions as necessary and equal to corporate or academic professions. I believe that students must participate in the inner workings of their school, democratically, in order to create the next generation of truly responsible and successful citizens. I also believe that, while change may come from the top eventually, change will come faster if students demand these rights. It is not right for students to work 50-60 hours per week to meet questionable standards, with the only reward being the possibility that sometime, in the future, they may find a better paying job, that may or may not fit their passions (which they are not encouraged to identify or pursue). Students must demand these rights, using the same passive forms of protest that characterizes other successful movements. In essence, the students must unionize, and demand, not ask for, the rights that every person deserves. Change will be slow, and difficult, but it can happen, and must happen, if we wish to prevent the academic, intellectual, and perhaps even economic collapse of our society.

-Fabian