What is School Really Teaching Our Kids?

When my oldest son was 4 years old, on about the 3rd day of 4K when I woke him in the morning to get ready for school he rolled over, put his hands behind his head and said “Dad, I don’t really feel like going to school today.”

I laughed a bit and shook my head, after all this was Day 3 of about 12 years! I told him, “well you better get ready anyway.”

I didn’t think much of it at the time. If I did, it was something along the lines of “yeah, duh, no one really wants to go to school, but that’s just what you do.”

I cringe at myself looking back on that moment. I didn’t question the wisdom or reasoning behind going to school, but I should have.

After all in the first 4 years of his life my son had learned to walk, talk, run, throw and understand a lot of social nuance. He straight up memorized multiple books we regularly read to him. How do I know this? Because he’d finish sentences and get mad if I tried to skip a page.

His judgment on whether things were funny or not was impressive considering how often he was able to retort with the proper quip for a situation. And he learned to apply logic in many real world ways. Of course, he did all these things without formal, forced teaching.

My son learned more novel things in those first 4 years than I had learned in the previous 10! And now I had the audacity to say to him that he needed to go to school so he could “learn.” What did I think he had been doing?

So now I question: what do they need to go to school for? What are we really training our kids to do when we send them to a place where they’re forced to sit still and do/learn things they’re not actually interested in?

I guess they’ll be ready to go and endure a job they don’t really like. School is very realistic in that sense.

Admittedly, this may be a bit cynical and definitely a radical idea. I initially rejected it with the expected rejoinders of: how will they get a “good” job without school? Or how will they get the needed socialization with other kids? And of course, they need to be well rounded with all the school subjects. I had all the scripted answers we’ve been hypnotized to believe after many years of school trying to justify itself.

It’s a topic I have eased into more and more and now I finally feel like I’m swimming in the deep end of it. Deep enough to really ask, what are we teaching our kids in school?

The journey of this topic isn’t necessarily a straight line but a great, free, place to start is with Seth Godin’s wisdom and insight in “Stop Stealing Dreams.” We owe it to our kids to at least start asking some questions about school.