What Are Children Really Learning in School?

Challenging how our society educates children...and what they're really learning

For close to 50 years now, I’ve been speaking and writing about how harmful school is for children and society, and promoting the alternative of self-directed learning. There are many reasons why I’ve dedicated a large portion of my life to that task and the current state of the world underlines the problems as I see them. I believe that we need to rethink how we help our kids and young people learn, but the idea that the education system works well is deeply entrenched. Here are some of the problems with schooling as I see them.

First off, school, by its very nature of being compulsory, is coercive. And that’s problematic in many ways, as I wrote here a few years back. We force children to be there (with a few small exceptions in some countries with the hoops getting harder to jump through in many). A large part of the reasoning behind compulsory schooling is that parents need to work during the day. (I wrote almost two decades ago about the solution to that and updated the essay here on my Substack last year.)

But there is much more to it than that. Our society has, probably as a result of the current generations having gone to school, come to accept the idea that being taught is the best way to learn, that a bunch of adults (some of whom don’t even have children) is best suited to decide what information children should ingest, and that regurgitating that information on a standardized test is the best way to judge the success of the memorization endeavor. Following rules and instructions – that is, being obedient – is also high on this list. As British author and psychologist Dr. Naomi Fisher put it recently on Facebook, “One of the life-long things we learn at school is how important school is.”

Since most of us adults are adultist, we unthinkingly accept this way of “helping” children! But school makes many children unhappy and many of them rebel so the help isn’t really help at all. Here are some examples of the disrespect, control, and mistreatment — even abuse — involved in many kids’ school experience. Some schools require uncomfortable standardized clothing. Many require permission to go to the bathroom, and that’s sometimes denied, or to go home when they want. Speaking when they are not spoken to and asking “inappropriate” questions are often outlawed and punished in favour of having sufficient time to get through the prescribed curriculum (and perhaps so teachers can maintain control). In many cases, lack of time is the excuse to remove children’s time to play and socialize. Along the way, they learn how to compete and that competition is better than cooperation if you want to succeed in the world, that bullying and the abuse of power are acceptable, that surveillance is normal, that social control via deference to the hierarchy and “experts” is crucial to the system’s functioning, that work is more important than unstructured play (and that play is not learning), and many other things that I see as being at the root of our civilization’s current problems. (Was that intentional in the design of schools? I’ll let you decide.)

Meanwhile, the history taught in schools is often incomplete, slanted, and somewhat useless, if not entirely bogus. The science children are taught usually involves replicating simple “experiments” to prove that the experts’ “facts” are right and that science can be settled, rather than being an ongoing search – in the way children have been doing it since they were born. They are told to memorize arithmetic equations and grammar rules as they were before the innovations of spelling and grammar checkers. They are directed to leave their phones and other electronic devices at home, rather than being helped to use discernment with them and technologies like AI. Thinking and questioning and curiosity are not popular traits for the student wanting to survive, let alone thrive during their school career where “good behaviour” is rewarded and everything else is punished.

I hope I’ve given enough examples of the nonsense and damage inflicted on children for you to think about how we are treating those people who will shape our future. If you want to delve further, there are many articles here in the Life Learning Magazine archives, some by me and many by other writers.

---

“You are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources?! Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!” ~ Utah Phillips