How I lost faith in schools

The honeymoon

I started working as a teacher back in 2014. I had newly graduated from the University of Oslo, with an MA in Nordic languages and rhetoric. The plan had been to set up as a consultant in communication and PR, but during my final year the newspapers started collapsing and my corner of the labor market was flooded with journalists with long resumés and a lot of contacts, who’d just been let go. For the next year, there was no job so crummy that there wasn’t an experienced journalist there to take it away from me.

Then, one day in November an old friend called me up and asked if I’d like to teach a class in music, “like, in 30 minutes”. At this point I had sold off every valuable thing I owned, so I ran over there. After class, I had a cigarette with a bunch of teachers, including the head of the linguistics department, and it turned out one of the teachers had given birth 10 weeks ahead of schedule just that day. Long story short: I went home with a bag full of papers to be graded over the weekend, and a job.

I enjoyed teaching, and I was pretty good at it. The students tended to like me because I made jokes and gave them a lot of trust, and I enjoyed the process of preparing classes and seeing what worked and what didn’t. I had a knack for finding metaphors and pop-cultural references that could make complicated concepts easier to understand, and I truly cared about the progress of every pupil. The staff meetings were dull but that was something everybody agreed on, and us teachers had the whole brothers-in-arms thing going with our common dislike of the pointless demands from the different strata of leadership, the nagging parents and the sluggish and kafkaesque structure of the school system itself. All in all, it was a great time.

Reality check

As the months went by I noticed that even though everything went pretty well, there were several students who made little to no progress. When I gave feedback on a text they’d written, they would nod and smile and sound motivated, but the next text would be even worse than the last one. As an experiment, I even spent the first minute of every class for two weeks repeating how to correctly spell a single word, and once again there would be no improvement on the next test. It was obvious that even though I was getting by alright, I wasn’t effective in the way I had imagined. If only the bright students are making progress, I thought, what’s the point of having compulsory education in the first place?

So I started talking — and listening — to some of these kids, and it turned out that they shared a complete disinterest in writing and reading well. I was such a nerd that I hadn’t even considered that option, and from then on my goal was to find ways of explaining or showing these kids how useful these skills were in every domain of life, or finding some overlap between whatever they were already interested in and whatever I wanted them to become interested in. It turned out that the students found this even more boring than regular writing assignments. After asking around again, the main sentiment seemed to be “You talk too much. Can’t we just get the assignments and receive our grades?”. To them, I was like the dad who invests way too much time and energy into some mundane activity, constantly nagging about subtleties and aspects that no one cares about — though in this case, the activity wasn’t even particularly fun at the outset.

So turning in assignments and getting grades was like a game to the students. This prompted me to look into grades, what they were for and how they worked. It only took a quick Google search to discover that there’s a ton of evidence from psychology that grades distract students from learning the subject, by turning the evaluation process into a game. But they also reliably make students risk-averse and distrustful of their own intuitions. In short, for graded assignments students tend to write whatever they believe the teacher wants to see, cheer if they get a good grade, pout if they get a bad one, and ignore all feedback.

Get rid of grades then! Well, it was going to be a while until I could try this out, and by that time I would be anticipating failure before I even started.

Rebellion

Three years later I landed a job at my local Waldorf-school. Severely understaffed, they were desperate to have me take over a problem class that no one wanted to teach. Nothing seemed to work, and the students were having a miserable time. Two months into my engagement, seeing as this school already advertised an opposition to exaggerated testing and grades, I decided to go gradeless. And in hindsight the results were not surprising: Even though the students liked me well enough, they just about stopped writing anything at all. Without the fear of negative consequences, they spent their time on social media, playing computer games or doing (graded) assignments from other teachers.

At this time I was halfway through my degree in teaching and had come to realize that there was something really, really wrong about the basic concept of schooling. I’d come to this conclusion from several independent lines of reasoning and research, and I’ve probably forgotten a few, but here are some of them:

• Coercion is a real ethical and pedagogical problem, and I was puzzled to find that it was never mentioned in the literature. Not even Hattie mentions it with a word in “Visible Learning”, perhaps one of the most comprehensive and thorough accounts of what matters in the classroom.
• Interest makes a huge, and while this sentiment was indeed echoed — often with pathos-laden flourishes — in the introduction of official documents and the like, they would always proceed to act as if every student was perfectly interested.
• Whenever it was said that “schools do a good job of teaching important skills”, or the like, I would ask myself “compared to what?”. I was absolutely shocked to discover that there is virtually no research on what happens when children are not subjected to compulsory schooling. Even worse; no one in pedagogy seemed interested to find out, and the only evidence out there (historical studies, small-scale comparisons, the much-hated field of psychometrics) seemed to indicate that schools were an impediment to learning.
• The mandate schools were meant to fulfill was not just unclear, but almost perfectly contradictory: Nurture kids into productive and happy citizens by treating them in a way that reliably causes citizens to become sick and unhappy. That is, by forcing them to endure a never-ending stream of pointless lectures and assignments.
• Aspects of the current system — common core, compulsion, age-specific cohorts — never had any pedagogical justification. In fact; resistance to these measures tended to constitute rare instances of broad agreement from every corner of the field of school research.
• Finally, a basic truth that kept me sane during these realizations: If any group could be subjected to sustained and organized abuse through five centuries of humanism, it would be children. As the one demographic that — to this day — can be publicly ridiculed and denigrated without consequence, ignored whenever they protest, and whose subjugation will always find justification through tradition and fear, our young are perfect victims of dogma.

After my failed (and to be fair; improvised and secret) experiment, the Waldorf school kept me away from teaching classes but kept me on the payroll as an assistant to struggling students on the spectrum, who refused to talk to anyone else. I didn’t care: I could be useless in a way that the school system approved of, or I could be useless in a way that was ethical. A no-brainer. Also, these students liked me; they always do.

Despondency and disgust

I worked another year as a teacher, this time for high schoolers, and it did not go well. I found the majority of what we did entirely pointless at best, and actively stupid and immoral at worst. Meetings were spent trying to keep kids who didn’t want to be there from hurting other kids who didn’t want to be there, finding efficient ways of making students parrot the contents of the common core, or making sure every official guideline was followed so our head of department or principal would avoid uncomfortable conversations with the superintendent.

Worst of all was discovering that most of the pupils had imbibed the lie that schools promoted learning. Their trust in the system left two culprits for the widespread lack of progress: themselves and the teacher. To my horror, I got increasing complaints about a lack of strict demands, slack discipline, as well as incomprehensible and meandering lectures, this last one leading to doubts about my knowledge and preparation. All true. Like the curious preacher going to seminary, I had studied myself into abject indifference.

So now I’m unemployed, and probably unemployable as a teacher for the foreseeable future. I’m not the only one who has taken this journey, and the sad irony is that what makes me a bad teacher is not incompetence, or indifference, but a concern for ethics. There may be jobs where such concerns are predictable liabilities, but for a teacher merely taking article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child seriously may lead to insurmountable problems. When teachers argue for more autonomy in the classroom, it is not just a matter of pedagogy; it is a matter of conscience, and we are now in a situation where the question of what is best for children — all children — has been decided by fiat. As someone who has debated this topic a lot, I can attest to the fact that this fiat is supported by hot air and little else.

The question that is all but ignored in school discourse, and which informs all other questions, is this: “Should children be regarded as people?”.

The current answer, sadly, is “no”.