Why did school fail?
Can you tell?
Imagine if you had to be at a location. Every day you must be there. At this location your life is fully scheduled including when you can eat, drink water, and you need permission just to use the rest room. You must obey the workers at this place, you cannot leave until they dismiss you. You cannot even roam freely within the location.
Did I describe school or prison?
Ok, but does it work?
Even if my characterization appears overly harsh, the fact is anything that even remotely resembles the description above is not going to lead to the flourishing of young minds. However, let us give them a fair shot. After all, if schools developed critical thinking skills they so readily tout the above description might be worth tolerating. Do they? Do they exhibit the very skills they claim to cultivate? Let’s see:
- Despite having physical education in their curriculum most schools expect your child to sit for about 7 to 9 hours a day which is known to shorten the hip flexor and lead to back pain.
- Despite the claim that schools develop critical thinking skills neither logic nor philosophy are core requirements for graduation.
- Despite the idea that school prepares you for the “real world,” it does not teach sales, marketing, budgeting, negotiating, nor even a basic introduction to managing savings/capital.
- Despite claiming to teach evidence based thinking all performance measures in schools involve confounding variables including: time of day, performance anxiety, test taking skills, and even which class precedes the test.
It is little wonder that the prevailing attitude towards modern education is that it doesn’t work.