Suicide against the Achievatron
I just finished reading David Brooks' "On Paradise Drive," his lesser-known follow-up to "Bobos in Paradise," and was struck by his description of education in America:
There exists in this country a massive organic apparatus for the production of children, a mighty Achievatron. Nobody planned it. There is no central control deck. But all the anxious parents, child psychologists, teachers, tutors, coaches, counselors, therapists, family-centered activist groups, and social critics organically cohere into an omnipresent network of encouragement, improvement, advice, talent maximization, and capacity fulfillment.... Worse than being run through the assembly line is not being run through it.
Indeed.
The problem here is that while all those high-school counselors are urging you ever onward on the Achievatron, some students can't help noticing that they're not actually learning many things relevant to the real world. As Bill Gates, noted college drop-out, put it:
Using words such as "ashamed" and "appalled" to describe his reaction to the failure rates for students, Microsoft's co-founder called America's high schools broken, flawed and underfunded, and said the system itself is obsolete..... Gates said that he wants to emphasize the "three R's — rigor, relevance and relationships." By that, he means stronger curricula (rigor), better preparation for work and higher education (relevance), and a school structure where students have more support from teachers and counselors (relationships).
Now, as it happens, the most valuable workplace skill I could have learned in school was how to use Excel, a program Gates owns. But the single most common thing I heard from adults when I was in high school was that nothing I would learn in it would have anything to do with what I did for a living. I can't remember how many times adults told me they had totally forgotten calculus or trigonometry because they never once used it in "real life." Nor how many times I was reminded on TV, in movies and in English class that most successful people are morons, assholes and incompetent (it's called the Peter Principle).
Kids can sense the disconnect, and the perceptive but not wise ones will want to rebel. If you could go back in time and ask the 16-year-old me why he refused to turn in his math homework, even though he had already done 90 percent of it and even though he was failing math, that me would not be able to explain coherently the madness of pretending to learn what authority figures were pretending was relevent, so one could obtain a soulless job that people would pretend was success. But I would have felt it, keenly.
In fact, I cheated the Achievatron. Every lazy student will claim his or her true genius will allow for great test scores, negating bad grades, though it rarely works out that way. It worked that way for me, though, and I used those scores to get into a decent liberal arts college, where I spent more energy on my relationship with my girlfriend than I did on classes or internships. Yet I landed a newspaper job within three months of graduation. Had I continued in my field and applied myself to real reporting, I could have gone far, in true American fashion.
For a long time now, people have criticized schools for reacting to rebellious students by medicating them rather than listening to them. Having taught classes of high-schoolers often myself, I know how appealingly simple that solution sounds. And in order for any real reform to work, schools would have to radically change, more along the Nova model than back to the days when my parents were graded on their Latin.
If I hadn't had the opportunities that I did, though - if I hadn't happened to live within commuting distance to one of the most important and ground-breaking alternative schools in America, if I hadn't been given the chance to study at a welcoming but rigorous Quaker college, if I hadn't been interested in a foreign country like Korea that happens to be in desperate need of English speakers - reacting as I did to the Achievatron would have been suicide. I wonder how many students like myself are committing education suicide as I write this, just to spite the Achievatron's insistence that we all don our tassel loafers to walk down the golf fairway of success.
America's insistence that all students can achieve success if they work hard, learn a diverse array of skills, focus on their future and play by the rules is wonderful. Its cognitive dissonance on the value of what we learn and why, though, is terrifying. Without real change in how and what we teach in schools, the temptation to leap off the Achievatron, giving our teachers and school counselors the middle finger as we plunge gleefully into failure, will keep buzzing around in the heads of perceptive but naive kids.
A full freakin' novel!