Freedom to Learn

These wounds are exactuly what happens to you once you start working in the real world. So I guess in that way, school is excellent preparation for a job in corporate America.

Hello Peter,

I think the biggest problem I had from the public school system was the inability to recognize boredom! Until about the mid point in college I pushed myself through the classes in my majors, convinced that I found the material exciting, when in reality I was bored senseless. I was not able to recognize this feeling of boredom. I was so used to drilling and pushing myself through assignments throughout my public school education that I was not able to say STOP I am not interested. Now that I think about, it is dangerous not to be able to recognize boredom and to be convinced that one has to push through material. Looks like it was great preparation to do mindless work and to be convinced that this is acceptable and normal! Another was perfectionism. I do not think I missed any assignment throughout my K-12 education. I came to believe that doing every single task was the norm and was not able to question this assumption that I operated on. When I was in college I began to miss assignments, skip assignments, focus on something I found interesting and leave out other areas. The problem was I had this sense of intense shame and guilt about missing assignments and I could not figure out where it was coming from! I thought the problem was with me. I realize it is necessary to look outside myself and understand the forces that influenced this kind of behavior. How can we teach students to look outside themselves and to understand where these feelings are coming from?

I think this list is remarkably thorough, accurate, and poignant. I was a model student. I expended so much effort into getting good grades and appearing “well rounded” that I didn’t have the time or energy to learn anything beyond what was required for the test or to explore and develop my own interests and abilities. I had no idea what I cared about or what my interests might be. I think this vagueness and the sense that I was one of the dull, insignificant people had negative consequences for my working life and the kinds of career choices I made.
As a student, I was docile on the outside and seething—bored, sad, anxious—on the inside. Now in my 50s, I have begun in the last several years to study subjects I have always wanted to learn about and to develop many new interests. This makes me feel alive in a way that school never did. I wish I had respected this independent streak when I was younger instead of keeping it hidden. I have always had great intellectual curiosity and feel I would have been better off with a tutor, who would have respected and nurtured that quality.
It was interesting to read yesterday’s Room for Debate column in the New York Times, on whether school librarians are still needed. I think a library is far more likely than a classroom to foster a love of learning. When I speak with friends and family who are readers about what inspired them, no one talks about memorizing material for exams, competing with peers, or spending hours on homework assignments. They do talk about the freedom and excitement of exploring books in a library or at home, sometimes with the encouragement and guidance of a sympathetic adult.
Thank you for this column. I look forward to reading the book.

As a teacher and a student - the 'Wounds of Underestimation' and the 'Wounds of Perfectionism' are the most damaging. Underestimating a student destroys initiative and perfectionism destroys the learning process because it tears down the positives of failure.

I tell my students that a test is just a snapshot in time, it tells you where you are right now, while you are taking a test. It tells you nothing else, and you can always change how much and what you know.

School teaches students that all learning is boring and pointless. It makes every endeavor a chore. I learned this lesson by high school - though I was an early and avid reader, by the time I was 14, I was so tired of having good books destroyed by English class that I decided in advance that any book we had to read would be awful. I distinctly remember hating Huckleberry Finn and fighting my teacher all the way. 20 years later, I love Mark Twain. I see this with almost all young people I meet - they consider all learning to be awful and this, in turn, creates the attitude that intelligent or educated people are "pointy-headed" and contributes to the coarsening of our national cultural and political discourse. Rather than being forced to learn a series of pointless facts, children need to learn that naturally pursuing one's interests via self-motivation is one of the greatest joys there is.

When I was in Elem/Middle school, I sought approval from teachers (including my private piano teacher) and wanted to do well (ie - get good grades, awards, etc.) I was praised and praised for this and encouraged to continue on that path. At some point though, I began to fear failure (in my mind mediocrity = failure... failure at being "the best" I could be). I began to fear "messing up" (in school as well as piano competitions/recitals), which affected my performance! I was still a pretty good student, but I absolutely didn't try "my best" to get good grades. If you aren't trying your best, you're not devastated when you make a mistake. I skated by in high school -- got mostly B's with some A's and C's thrown in. I was still a pretty good pianist, but skipped some competitions and recitals I was recommended for b/c I was afraid I'd not be as good as I was expected to be.

I went to college to be a teacher b/c I hoped that I could be THAT teacher that encouraged kids and who tried new and exciting things. Unfortunately, I didn't find teaching in the public school system allowed me freedom to try creative things in my classroom. I was expected to do exactly what the administration wanted me to do -- test, quiz, give worksheets, give writing assignments, etc, to determine grades -- in a performance based music class!

Now I'm home and an Unschooling mom and so happy that my kids aren't subjected to the wounds of traditional school.

I write about these seven wounds and a few more in my book Free Range Learning.

There are also many wounds of disconnection. Schoolwork separates what is deemed "educational" from the rest of the young child's experience. Subject matter in school, even when taught well, tends to be indirect, inactive, removed from the fibers that connect it to everything else. A divide appears where before curiosity and motivation were present. Now absorption and play are on one side, in opposition to work and learning on the other. This sets the inherent joy in learning adrift. The energy that formerly prompted a child to explore, ask questions, and eagerly leap ahead becomes a social liability. Wholeness is lost.

Wounds of disconnection from the body. The schoolchild is confined indoors and most often kept seated. Throughout the day the focus is largely on his or her brain, in fact, largely one hemisphere of the brain. This is what is challenged and graded. But learning can't be separated from the body. Movement informs understanding, particularly proprioception and kinesthetic awareness necessary to every person's development. "Sit still and pay attention" ignores the vital ways children encode learning. Even unrelated physical activity leads to bodily fitness, which is directed related not only to health but also to greater comprehension across a range of academic areas.

Wounds of disconnection from family, from elders, from the community. Throughout most of human history children have matured while observing, imitating, and playing in proximity to people of all ages---people they know and trust. They haven't been confined to peer relationships where the models for behavior and reasoning are limited to people of the same age. Peer friendships are, of course, vital, but peer culture without the tempering influence of strong role models of all ages often lean toward cynicism, cruelty, and exclusion.

Wounded students do learn, but not necessarily what they're taught. They learn to be frustrated. They learn boredom, passivity, judgment. They learn to quell independent thought. They don't let their whole selves bubble up in art, or real questions, or curiosity. Gradually the natural moment-to-moment curiosity of a child is distorted until they resist learning anything but what they "have" to learn. Then the life force is drained from education.