Cumpulsory Schooling?

I hate to go against President O’bama and our local superintendent of schools, but I don’t think we need to raise the compulsory school attendance age from 16 to 18. In fact, I’m not sure a compulsory attendance law is a good idea at all.  How’s that for flying in the face of popular common sense? Note my “not sure” stance.  Let’s see if I can convince you and me that requiring students to attend school is not only unnecessary, but in some cases, is cruel and unusual punishment for students and teachers. 

For some students, schooling is an anti-intellectual experience. For some, the problems start at the beginning. They never fit in comfortably with their peers. They discover early that learning in school is difficult.  It’s a source of embarrassment. Parents and teachers fret over their “failures”.  To protect their ego and self-esteem, these unfortunate students employ defense mechanisms: they convince themselves they don’t care; they don’t like reading and math; they either withdraw to avoid calling attention to themselves, or they become aggressive and disruptive. By the end of elementary school, some of these students have become hard-core problems for teachers and other students. The irony for these unfortunate students is there is often nothing inherently wrong with them.  Circumstance has them on a different learning schedule.  If reading instruction had begun at age seven instead of age five, they might have been fine.  If they had been given better instruction or more time to master the basics of adding and subtracting, they might not have been so befuddled by multiplication. But the curriculum is rigid. A child not showing signs of reading by age six is at risk.  If they don’t catch up to their peers by age seven, they will know failure and stress at a young age.  It is an experience that is hard to get over.

On the opposite end of the failure scenario is the boredom scenario experienced by the most able students – the children who absorb information from a multitude of sources and develop reading and mathematic skills in spite of a dreadfully slow pace of instruction. If these quick learners are compliant, they are not a problem for schools in the early years; but as they get older, they use their creativity and energy in ways that give teachers and students real headaches. In many school systems, the intellectually quick students are about as likely to drop out of school as the intellectually slow students.

Now, consider the need for freedom, dignity and self-determination for all human beings. Students wait to go to the bathroom, to get a drink of water and to eat.  They wait to be called on and to be told what to do next.  It is a life governed by the clock and the calendar.  It is a life of constant testing and grading. Students have to show over and over again what they know and can do. The number of times they have to hear about nouns and numbers, fractions and fragments seems to never end. They have to defend themselves against bullies. School can be a social boot camp. And students cannot quit and tell the sergeant to shove it.

School, even at the kindergarten level, is a formal institution.  It has regulations, policies and commitments to keep to taxpayer and politicians.  With end of grade tests, it has a tight schedule for learning from which teachers and students cannot escape. Given the rigidity of formal schooling, children should only go to school when they were ready to learn.  If they were not ready, they will be exposed to failure. If teachers judge students unready or unwilling to learn, they should be sent home.

No adult would tolerate living or working under similar circumstances that many students face. But we will require our (or other people’s) children and teenagers to do what we would not do, even when the evidence suggests it is not in their best interest. I suppose we do this because we think there are no other options. We cannot have gangs of young ruffians roaming the city streets.  We think we must continue to hope that schools will solve the social problems that other agencies of society have been unable to solve.  While we wait, the kids keep going to school. 

I invite your responses to this.  We are all teachers and we are obligated to nurture our children and guide our teenagers toward adulthood.  You surely have ideas and stories to contribute to this discussion.