What is the Purpose of School?

What is the purpose of school? Can it be okay that different people have different ideas about why they send their children away to other people for most of the day for an average of fourteen years?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that our country went mad one hundred years ago when compulsory education began to gather steam, and our collective mental condition has only deteriorated since then. We seem to be suffering from the delusion that education makes us better human beings, and I just don’t see any evidence of that.

The other morning, I dropped Lucas off at his preschool. After checking in with his teacher, he followed me back out to the gate to wave goodbye. I looked back at him standing behind the fence waving to me as I drove away, and I thought how strange it was to be leaving him there, while I drove down the hill to spend the day teaching other people’s children.

How very, very strange.

Why do I do this seemingly insane thing? Why do I spend five days a week giving my all to other people’s children, while trusting, hoping that someone else is doing likewise with mine? And why do families across this country and around the world send their children away to other people?

Part of that answer is that our society doesn’t pay us to be parents. With many single-parent homes and dual wage-earning households, who is home to watch the kids? I think this is a much bigger part of the answer than most people are willing to honestly consider. It relegates education to childcare, and if we pretend otherwise, we’re fooling ourselves.

And we have – fooled ourselves, that is. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that education is about creating leaders, thinkers, and innovators for tomorrow. Hmmm. Really? Think about what you learned in school. What was innovative about it? Were you encouraged to question the teacher’s ideas or think for yourself? If you weren’t the most popular kid in class, what did you learn about leadership? No, any leadership, creative thinking or innovation has happened in spite of a system that seems hell bent on crushing it.

This is even truer today than it was twenty years ago. The effect of No Child Left Behind and the explosion of standardized testing is that students are now taught only what’s on the test. They are learning how to take tests, how to cheat, and how to game the system. Meanwhile, teen suicides and stress-related disorders in children and teens are at an all-time high. An in-depth look at this phenomenon is explored in the film, Race to Nowhere, being screened privately across the country right now. I highly recommend the film! It was eye-opening for me, and I’ve been in this field since the ‘90s.

So … what should we be doing with the country’s entire population of children in our care? Thus far, it seems most people think we should be teaching them specific things, though what those things are vary greatly depending on who you talk with. Should we teach them skills, trades, history, the classics, technology, the basics, the arts, the sciences? Political will and cultural forces have historically pushed the pendulum first one way and then another, but I think we’ve become hypnotized into thinking that our answer lies somewhere along that pendulum’s path. What if the purpose of education is … none of the above?

What if we let go of the pretense that school is a place for adults to teach children things we want them to learn? Because guess what? They aren’t learning it, anyway. They’re learning the system. They’re learning competition and scarcity. They’re learning conformity and obedience - or if not, they’re learning that they don’t belong. They’re learning to take tests, and they’re learning a whole host of dysfunctional habits and beliefs that will take them years of therapy to work through and release.

What if we stopped pretending to know what our economy will require fifteen years from now, when we don’t even know what it will take to dig ourselves out of the current financial mess created by people who were trained by this very school system to compete and consume at all costs?

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What if, instead, we embraced the notion that school is, indeed, childcare – caring for children? What if academic learning was more of a side benefit; or a natural result of children’s innate curiosity and imagination when they’re not squelched by our adult concepts of reality and importance?

What would it have been like for you if school had been a place in which you felt you utterly belonged? A place in which you were deeply cared for, understood, and nurtured as the unique and special person you are? What would it have been like to have been allowed your own natural timeline for development without arbitrary benchmarks labeling you “behind” or “ahead?” What would you have said, challenged, questioned, wondered if you had felt safe to speak your truth? What would it have felt like to have been able to discover and explore your natural gifts and interests, no matter what they were?

How much of what you were taught do you use or even remember? Isn’t it possible that your time could have been much better spent?

So, so, so …

I say, instead of educating them, let’s deeply care for the children entrusted to us by their parents for this long and precious road to maturity. Let’s respect that childhood has its own timeline and its own priorities, and allow children to be children. Let’s respect that each individual has their own unique gifts to share with the world, and give everyone – not just the mathematicians and scientists – the opportunity to explore and nurture those gifts. Let’s allow children to feel the joy and confidence that come from overcoming worthy challenges that they set for themselves. Let’s give the children safe boundaries, loving guidance, and practical tools for lifelong respectful interactions with others.

We’ve been making it so very, very complicated, when what’s needed, in my not-so-humble opinion, is really quite simple. Let’s get honest with ourselves about why we do this thing called compulsory education in the 21st century.