“Did You Like School? I Didn’t” (David Labaree)

David Labaree describes his blog:

“I’m a retired professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education.  I see this blog as an opportunity for me to continue my work as a teacher without the annoyances of having to teach classes, grade papers, and attend faculty meetings.  It will allow me to exercise my teacher voice and to explore the wide range of issues that I have raised in my classes over the years.   The idea is to write for a broader audience, freed from the annoying conventions and stilted jargon of the academic journal article. “

This post appeared on his blog “David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing,”  November 9, 2023.

Did you like school?  I didn’t. 

            In way that’s strange, since I did well at school and in the long run it did well for me.  It got me into college and graduate school and eventually provided the subject matter for my career as an education professor.  Nonetheless, school gave me the creeps, and it still does. That’s one of the reasons I chose to study the history of education, so I wouldn’t have to step inside a school.  The creepy feeling was especially strong at the elementary level.  By high school it got better, as I was able to enjoy the camaraderie of a group of friends even while constantly worrying about being too nerdy and uncool.  It was only in college I came into my own, for the first time able to embrace intellectual pursuits in a peer setting where that was not considered weird and stigmatizing.

            But elementary school was fraught with chronic fear for me.  Fear of being called on in class, humiliated in front of peers, dressed down by the teacher or conversely seen as the teacher’s pet, dreading bullies in the school yard, embarrassment around girls, and rejection by boys.  I used to fake illness a lot in order to avoid going to school, which my mother tolerated on the understanding that I needed mental health days to recover from the daily ordeal of schooling.

            I’m bringing this up because people like me – educators and educational researchers – need to remind themselves that school is not an unalloyed good.  Too often, I think, we in the education business tend to lose track of the reality that schooling can be a very unpleasant experience for the students going through it.  Often we had a good experience in school, finding ourselves in a positive environment where we thrived, so we decided to go into the education business instead of joining the real world.  And often, like me, we did not have a good experience but managed to repress our early  memories of schooling in the light of the later benefits it provided us – a good job and a respectable social status.  Students who weren’t as shy and anxious as I way may not have had the same fears about school that I did. But then I was one of the lucky ones who did well at the tasks that schools value.  What about the kids for whom school was a Sisyphean hell of recurring academic failure?

            We need to remember how unnatural schooling is, how foreign it is to the children who encounter it.  Ripped from their families, kids find themselves thrown into the cauldron with hundreds of other students in a large building that simply screams “institution.”  They are then grouped by age into classrooms of 25 or so.  No longer unique members of a small family, they suddenly become part of a group of generic first graders placed under the authority of a strange adult.  There they are subjected to a standard set of rules for behavior in a crowd, ordered by buzzers, and make to walk in quietly in lines when moving through the halls.  And in between the buzzers they are harnessed to a standard curriculum that compels them to sit quietly in their seats for hours on end carrying out tasks they had no part in choosing.

            As a child, you quickly discover that schooling is your job.  You have to get up early every weekday morning for 180 days a year, march off to school with lunch and books in hand, and then march home at the end of the day, often bearing homework that you need to complete by the next morning.  And this goes on for 12 years, 14 if you count preschool.  Really, what an ordeal.  Could anything be more unnatural and unpleasant?

            Sadly the answer to this question is that for many children there are indeed worse ways to be spending their days.  At least in school they have heat, hot meals, and a relatively safe environment, none of which may be true at home.  Because of this factor, my timing in writing this piece may feel jarring, since so many students have suffered mentally from being barred from attending school in person.  (I wrote two earlier pieces about what students lose when schools close.) This, however, this is less cause to praise school in my mind than cause to denounce an inadequate welfare system that denies many children the basics of food, shelter, and safety.           

            The batch processing of children in age-graded classrooms carries other costs as well.  Pressed together with peers in the same room for a year, they find themselves in an intense social setting without the organizing principle of age that governs family life.  You can’t compete with your older siblings, who enjoy natural advantages over you, but in a classroom of peers competition becomes the norm – a continual struggle over who is taller, faster, meaner, better looking, more assertive, more athletic, and – oh yes – smarter. 

            Educators focus their attention on the latter characteristic, which is facilitated by age-grading.  Immediately upon entering school, students find themselves evaluated in hierarchical relation to their peers, using the abstract metric known as “grade level.”  Are you above or below grade level?  Smarter or dumber than your fellow classmates?  Every question you answer, every homework you submit, every test you take locates you on a curve from high achiever to low achiever. 

            Meanwhile students develop their own hierarchies, largely independent of the teacher’s system of ranking.  The teacher’s scale is based on individual merit as measured by the cognitive skills schools care about, but the students’ scale has a more Hobbesian quality about it.  When the Leviathan is not looking, the students are busy working out a status order on their own terms.  No student wants to look dumb to the teacher in academic terms but also no student wants to look inferior to peers in the terms that these peers care most about:  popularity, personality, pulchritude, physical prowess, and power.

            As a result, school can look like the worst of both worlds for students.  They’re subject to the autocratic control of the teacher in classroom matters and to the survival of the fittest on the playground.  Take your pick – Alcatraz or Lord of the Flies.