But maybe the fact that some kids can pay attention for 6 hours has made us as a society expect that kids should be able to pay attention for 6 hours and that the ones who can't are somehow deficient. Perhaps this is to everyone's detriment and the optimal solution for education for everyone is not the classroom model.
I think your stance is completely faulty. Children aren't sent to 6-8 hours of school a day because it was discovered that some subset of them liked it and we decided to just implement it across the board.
We decided as a society that not only is education valuable for people, it's a human right. So we, as a society, have failed if we fail to provide an education for our children.
Many children don't like going to school. Some subset of children wind up acting out in a ton of different ways, but often it is disruptive to classes and wastes a ton of time. Their actions have a direct negative impact on the children who actually want to attend classes and learn. But education is the right of everyone, even children who actively resist school, so we don't remove them.
I get the point you're trying to make, that maybe our children would benefit more from just being allowed to be children, to be rowdy and play with friends, have freedom and activity instead of hours of lessons per day sitting in a chair. I get that. I even agree with it to a point.
But it's extremely asinine to suggest that somehow this is the fault of the well behaved kids or the kids who genuinely love school.
I'm not saying it's their fault, I'm saying that their ability to participate fully may have led educators to think that their peers who cannot do so are deficient, rather than that the education process itself could be improved so everyone can fully participate in it.
These passive aggressive kids who try to dismantle the class need to be removed from good students. People online demand that teachers be like part superhero, part hilarious talk show host they don’t realize how exhausting it is to hold back 20-30 kids day after day for that one kid or group who hate going to school and only want to ruin the day for everyone else.
We can all admit that there are some toxic people at the office yet to suggest as much with children is heavily frowned upon. I now have a live and let live approach to these specific kids. They can waste time, zone out, even chat with their buddies but as soon as they cross the line into bothering someone else then I must intervene.
It’s really difficult to make everyone happy. It’s so wild to me how some kids will love me while others will view me as like some kind of antagonist in a Charles Dickens story no matter how much I try to win them over. They just don’t want to be there.
We'll have to confront the nature of our education system pretty soon anyway since automation will probably destabilize the way society parcels out work and keeps people busy
Some kids are diligent and eager to learn, but that doesn't mean keeping them on often absurd tasks or tasks with few applications in the real world is meaningful. Spending a decade optimizing for specific exams for specific institutions whose degrees are undergoing inflation at a rapid pace doesn't seem very efficient, but at least it's a compromise between various actors with various needs (parents needing a break, a lack of resources for each child, companies needing a quick if imperfect way to evaluate candidates, young people wanting an environment with people their own age etc.) Unfortunately, this compromise is being torn asunder by systemic forces that keep parts of it in place and make other parts increasingly unworkable.
I don't have a solution in mind right now but I don't think it's as simple as just dumber kids ruining it, although it obviously is a factor in what makes schools unpleasant
This is a really thoughtful examination of the problems with contemporary public schooling, thank you for posting it.
I do want to add that it's not necessary "dumb" kids who are ruining it. Just kids who don't want to be there, either because they don't want to participate or because they are bored, or because they aren't capable of sitting quietly for hours and hours, or they'd rather do something else, or whatever.
Younger me would have paradoxically been in both the diligent and alienated category. The older I get, the more I realize that the openly rambunctious kids I went to school with probably had the right idea all along. They were experiencing an intuitive and deeply human reaction to what is essentially a wasteful cargo-culting process where grades and other such surrogate activities are mistaken for actions that directly contribute to life. It's a classic case of confusing ease of control and predictability for actual value. To some extent there is real value in the work, in that its get your foot through the door which in turns gets your foot in a series of potentially more pleasant doors down the the line. But the process is so utterly inefficient in terms of the effort and opportunity cost expended compared to what a job actually requires in the real world.
I hope I'm not coming across as bitter, because I am in fact quite optimistic. We have the technological means to spread education far more easily. Bright students are faced with a more competitive world but also have the tools to make progress on just about anything. With ML, it might even be possible to offer personalized courses and the attention that every individual kid or young adult might need.
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