Member-only story
Should Schools Be Countercultural?
Do we prepare kids for the “real world” or give them an oasis from it?
Every summer, a trip to the grocery store spelled the beginning of the end for my kids.
When they were little, they’d come with me each weekend to pick up the food for the week. They usually enjoyed it — at least until they got to the seasonal aisle. You see, at the beginning of the summer, the seasonal aisle would be full of fun summer stuff — sparklers, picnic supplies, pool noodles. But then — often, cruelly, right after the Fourth of July — they’d encounter something depressing in the seasonal aisle: school supplies.
Gone were the water guns and coolers; in their place were pencils, notebooks, and lunch boxes. Sometimes my kids would literally refuse to look down that aisle because it told them what they knew was inevitable but preferred to ignore: Summer would have an end, and that end was closer than they wanted it to be.
There’s something bittersweet about the last few weeks of summer. Kids (and teachers) realize that soon they’ll be rising before the sun and living their lives according to the dictates of the bell. The end of summer constitutes, for many kids, the end of one way of living and the beginning of another.
But what experience should kids be heading back to?
Schools are their own little universes, each with a unique internal logic. They have a permeable barrier with the outside world, allowing some elements of the “real world” in while keeping others out. There’s long been a debate about how porous this barrier should be, and the technological, social, and economic changes of the last few decades have intensified these disagreements.
Over the almost quarter century I’ve been teaching high school, there’s been a tug-of-war between two ideals of education. When students return to school this fall, should educators try to prepare them for the world as it is, or give them an alternative to it?
For a long time, the prepare-kids-for-the-world-as-it-is crowd was winning. I went to countless professional development sessions where experts told us that we were teaching “digital natives” who would be working in a new economy, performing jobs that didn’t exist yet…
