This is the second in a series of articles on understanding and reforming education. In the first article, I suggested that much of the time we spend in school is a waste of time.
The point of this article is that schools create failures precisely because they try to, and do, create winners!
It is clearly not the intention of schools to create failure. In fact, they have created remarkable successes! It’s also not that the vast majority of teachers don’t strive to contribute to the success of students.
But it is precisely the nature of the system itself: If you have a winner or success, by default, you must also have losers or failure!
Let’s take a look at this. When you take a test, you either pass or fail. You either pass or fail a subject. You pass or fail elementary school, high school, college and graduate school. You can even fail your doctoral dissertation! You pass or fail getting a job because you passed or failed in these school stages.
The system has numerical, or alphabetical rankings: A or B = Winners. C = Average. D = Almost loser. F = Loser. Is it possible that after years of hearing “average” or “failure” applied to them, kids/people might think of themselves as simply average — or failures? Because schools create a culture of success, they create a culture of failure.
I don’t think it has to be this way.
Education seems to be based on the model of competition in sports. Teams compete to win. In order for one team to win, the other has to lose. That is what, by definition, games of competition are. Perhaps it goes back to caveman days where the real game wasn’t a game: It was kill or be killed!
Why do we maintain this barbarous custom in our schools today? Does schooling have to be a competition?
No teacher who is in a school system is trying to create failures. But they are trapped in the system that forces them to do it. It is called the grading system!
What would it take for us to get the concept, the word, “failure” out of education? What would it take to create competence without creating competition? How could we define success so that every student would be a success?
Thankfully, many teachers in many schools are already aware of this and are working for what’s best for each student.
Going back a century to Montessori schools and even before, many new and innovative systems are introduced regularly, in order to do what’s best for each student. Many teachers strive valiantly to do this within the current system. But they are constrained by a system that unwittingly denies success as well as creating it.
I leave you with five questions for your homework assignment:
1. How would you define “success,” so that it would be achievable by every child?
2. What would have to happen in order for that to happen?
3. Wouldn’t that be different for each child?
4. If so, how would we measure it, grade it?
5. Most importantly, why?
Teachers, you might read this article and questions to your class and see what they respond. Parents, ask these questions of your schoolchildren. Schoolchildren, ask these questions of your parents.
Here is a story to finish: Johnny woke up one day and said: “Mom, I hate school and I am not going to go today.”
“But you have to go!” she replied.
“Give me one good reason why,” Johnny told his mother.
“First of all, you are 42 years old, and secondly, you are the principal!”
Frank Sanitate taught high school English for five years over a half-century ago. He has published three books and had a successful seminar business for 40 years. You can reach him at franksanitate@gmail.com.
Frank Sanitate
The author lives in Santa Barbara.
