Despite a century of reform movements, American schools do not work.
While superintendents scratch their heads and politicians proclaim the brilliance of minor tweaks, it's time to call into question the very foundation of our system.
The deepest crisis in K-12 schools is not reading skills, or violence, or teacher pay. It's an absence of meaning. The only solution is to disband compulsory schooling altogether. To save education, we must make school optional.
It may seem absurd to suggest that reducing schooling will improve education. But, as educational theorist John Taylor Gatto pointed out in his book, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling, "education" and "schooling" are not synonyms. Education is natural; schooling is artificial.
Children are born with an insatiable desire to explore and to improve themselves. They poke and prod the world, asking questions and following their interests.
Yet, students - not teachers - are the biggest problem in contemporary schools. By the time they enter middle school, the majority are bored and turned off by the subject matter.
This isn't, as many of us presume, because teenagers are inherently lazy jerks but because their schooling has taught them that the subject matter is meaningless. This is pointed out by Alfie Kohn in Punished By Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes.
In school, the primary importance of studying English, history, and math is to pass tests and receive high grades. Children are locked into a system of learning abstract information for which they have no interest on the promise that, someday, they'll be able to land a good job. Students are removed from the real world, where they might develop the interests that a school education could satisfy.
A sense of meaning comes from living life - from making choices, taking risks, helping others and shouldering responsibility in a community.
John Mayer's song is precisely wrong - there is such a thing as the real world, and it's more wonderful than school. Schools deny the ordinary living of life to students by taking up half their waking hours (plus homework) and segregating them from people and activities that could be of real educational value.
It's no wonder our teen-suicide rate is so high. Children are not taught to value life and meaning but are forced to work toward fairly meaningless goals.
Schools teach that the true path of learning is not to live your life, to pursue your goals and to help other people. Rather, it's to sit in your desk, to not argue with the teacher, to obey all authority -- no matter how idiotic - and to please spit out your gum.
Schooling is artificial, but that doesn't make it useless. Voluntary schooling generally works; we know of good colleges and vocational schools, piano lessons and martial arts academies. Because students choose to attend, the schools can hold up high standards. More importantly, students perform well because they know it's in their best interest.
Mandatory schooling may work well for some (likely, many of those who read The State Press), but it succeeds only at the ruin of many others - all the graduating high school seniors who pledge, "I'll never read another book again."
So let's fundamentally rethink schooling's place in our society. Let's refashion the whole system with the conviction that even the stupidest child has a role to play in his own education, and allow students to choose what they want to learn and when they want to learn it.
Let's let them choose to not attend school, but to participate in volunteer work or a career. They'll learn outside of school, and when they attend, they can learn what they want and learn it well. Schools currently double as daycares. Let's free them to be what they aspire to - centers of education.
Brandon Hendrickson is a history and religious studies graduate, currently working as a tutor and studying to teach high-school American history. Disparaging remarks concerning his common sense can be sent to Brandon.Hendrickson@asu.edu.
