How schools can hurt children

Some kids thrive in schools while others struggle and the difference is frequently not due to intelligence. As a teacher I have had many bright students who dropped out of school out of frustration with the school system and as a father I have a gifted kid who is struggling in school.

There are ways in which schools can harm all kids and there are, of course, many individual ways in which schools can hurt children. Unfortunately the trend towards individualized learning has been mostly reversed in the past decade due to standardization.

How do schools hurt all kids? Often school is simply too much:

• Too much sitting
• Too much homework
• Too much rote learning and memorization
• Too much stress and pressure
• Too much focus on curriculum rather than real life skills and school as a space for living

Apart from that our school system is in many ways still too traditional. Often still too hierarchical. The kids nowadays are growing up in an environment in which parents and other grown-ups are regarded more as partners in life rather than superiors. Such strict hierarchies often don’t even exist in most companies and organisations anymore. More and more kids refuse to learn in such an environment, when what they really need is more human connection and interaction which are increasingly getting lost in our modern world.

What’s more most kids don’t have the social skills they used to have. Most of them are a bit delusional in thinking that half of the people in the world are evil (I have heard this many times in the past couple of years). Of course, bullying and conflicts do occur, like they have always. However, fears of bullying and conflicts are often overblown, not least because of scaremongering by the media. However,  the inability to bear conflicts in class and the inability to connect to schoolmates is making a lot of students stay at home from school.

What I have seen as a teacher in the past two decades is an increase in psychological problems like ADHD, depression, school anxiety (tests and bullying) and social phobia. Teachers often don’t understand the pressures on teenagers nowadays, because they grew up in completely different times. The often see lazy and unmotivated kids when in my experience the opposite is even more often true: kids who hurt themselves by making school the only centre of their lives. By high school most kids don’t have hobbies like musical instruments and sports anymore. Of course, they do watch Netflix, play video games and hang out with their friends, and spend an enormous time on their smartphones, but they also need these activities to fight stress, loneliness and depression.

Schools have been very slow to react to these problems. In Austria individual learning counselors and increased psychological  have been introduced. However, most students refuse to make use of such services, mainly due to two reasons:

• The social stigma connected to psychological problems (making them aware that these problems are common and widespread would help)
• The fear that these services only serve a single purpose: to push them back into a system they have been trying to escape all along

Schools definitely need to take away a lot of the pressure of standardized testing and focus more on the school as a space for living. After all schools are not only institutions where kids learn, but also places where they spend a considerable part of their lives. Failing to recognize this will only increase the diagnosis of problems such as ADHD, bipolar disorder, OCD and anxiety disorders. According to many medical institutions up to 25% of our youth already suffers from these problems now. Anxiety, stress and depression cause kids to hide from the outside world and close their minds. This is less than a fertile ground for learning. Teachers need to make sure the kids keep an open mind, otherwise they are bound to learn for tests only and lose any interest in learning at all. 

When the kids become difficult in school it is mostly not because they are inherently agressive or lazy. It's because they have lost their connection to their classmates, teachers and their interest in learning what the school has to offer them. A lot of teachers misinterpret the signs and try to control the students with more hierarchy and distance. This is exactly what leads to this vicious circle in the first place. 

for Andrej and Alexander, my two sons