Thinking About School and Why Some Kids Don’t Like It...

I bet a long time ago, what you wanted to have happen in a day was what you needed to figure out how to make happen. If you were hungry, you had to find your food and prepare it, if you wanted shelter, you had to make it or help make it, and if you were cold you’d have to make a fire and figure out how to stay warm.

I like to think about this because it helps me understand why my kid might be reluctant to push through math problems or handwriting—because it just might not be the thing he wanted to have happen that day—and maybe because he didn’t have an appetite for it and it didn’t warm his heart, is why it isn’t fulfilling to him, even after he’s met the expectation.

To contend with this obvious dissociation, society says, “Well, what about if you do the math and the spelling for a Letter A? That might whet your appetite. And what better way to warm your heart than to be better than your peers?”

“Well, I guess...”

“And, we can even throw in a diploma, as a token of all your effort trying to get all these Letter A’s, which you’re welcome to frame and hang on the wall for everyone to see!”

“Well, Ok...”

So education became about learning something in order to receive something that stands for the things we humans have always valued—a sense of self and a sense of accomplishment. But yet this dissociation from the direct equation of wanting something and working hard to get that very thing, is what I think keeps many kids from being lit up and fulfilled by their education.

I think that might be why wilderness schools are popping up. Schools that give kids those natural spaces to use their bodies and minds in order to solve problems and push through to achieve what they want to achieve and see it happening right there.

And I also think it’s why some kids love games like Minecraft. It’s a world these kids are willing to enter because in that world they can learn to type and spell, not to get a good grade, but because they want to communicate with their friends in order to connect and solve the problems in the game as a team—like making shelters, finding food, crafting what they need to thrive and stay safe, and to also win at their game.

So when I’m trying to get my son’s attention while he’s learning to negotiate and express himself with his Minecraft tribe and I say, “Come on, honey, let’s do school,” it’s so weird. Because truth be told, if I’m willing to see what’s really going on, he’s already learning, in the only world where his style of learning is available to him (thus far). So by taking him out of learning his way and saying, “Oh no, what you’re doing isn’t school, but if you’ll just mosey on over here... and read aloud from this textbook... and answer these questions... THEN you’ll have a chance to be successful, one day.”

As I read more about the colonization of education, the thing that strikes me as so true, is that our society is designed so that everyone gets to be the gears running the machine. The grown-ups have to work and since it’s illegal for the kids to join them, the kids have to be dropped off somewhere. So the kids are taught to listen and do as they’re told because that’s the criteria for being a gear in this great machine.

But the problem, more and more, is that the machine is outdated, and the main reason it’s outdated is because it’s not working for everyone. Human beings are evolving to understand their worth. And with this understanding, they’re having bigger ideas and believing in these ideas, and they’re wanting to build new systems that reflect these bigger ideas.

I’m not imagining we have to completely dismantle the old machines, but I do believe, especially after these months in our pandemic, that we’re definitely overdue for a major update. And perhaps the update for schools might be to create environments where kids get to choose what and how they’d like to learn and be able to get the resources to enable that learning to happen.

-JLK