adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.
children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.
couple things here:
multiple things can actually be bad at the same time
I’m 32
couple more things:
Little kids really aren’t equipped to work full time without damaging their physical, mental, and emotional development and health, and when you play the “but adults work all day!” card you sound like a nineteenth century textile baron.
Highschoolers can easily be “working” 40+ hours a week, between school, homework, and extracurriculars and/or part-time work, and still hear this smug “:/ wait til you get to the real world sweaty” rhetoric all the time.
The original claim here wasn’t even “school is too hard,” it was “school is failing to perform its most basic function,” which is different.
Another problem with school is students aren’t allowed to exercise creativity or learn real skills unless they go to a prestigious institution. For 80% of the student population, their education is just listen to the lecture, memorize the textbook, and vomit that on a paper at the end of the year.
And students are told that marks are the thing that determines their future but then you see 9.0 GPA students who struggle in the workplace because they only know how to write tests and memorize, while people who struggled with exams have better jobs because they know the knowledge.
At least at your job you can think for yourself how the work should be done. At school there’s only one way, that’s it, and if it’s not exactly according to your teacher’s standard it’s wrong.
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