{"id":35852,"date":"2016-09-30T01:00:09","date_gmt":"2016-09-30T05:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35852"},"modified":"2016-09-18T10:37:34","modified_gmt":"2016-09-18T14:37:34","slug":"qotd-why-is-high-school-so-deadly-dull","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/09\/30\/qotd-why-is-high-school-so-deadly-dull\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Why is high school so deadly dull?"},"content":{"rendered":"

All teaching takes a toll on what\u2019s taught, but high school is wondrously efficient at making interesting things dull. So why are kids forced to go? Well, one reason has to do with child-\u00adlabor laws. In the middle of the 19th century, kids in most states could stop going to school after eighth grade, once they had learned to read and do a little arithmetic, and they got jobs. They worked on farms or in dark satanic mills, and one by one the states made laws (or began to enforce existing laws) that said that young people had to stay in school so their morals wouldn\u2019t be corrupted and they wouldn\u2019t languish in ignorance and be roped into a life of labor from dawn to dusk and die of consumption before they reached 30. So the government built high schools, lots of them, and the number of kids in high school burgeoned, and blossomed, and ballooned. By 1940, there were five times as many high-school graduates as there were before the labor-\u00adlaw reforms. It was a huge change all over the country, and it required discipline. Squads of truant officers would go sniffing around finding kids who were evading high school, and they threatened parents with fines or even jail time and got them to comply.<\/p>\n

What happens if you suddenly have millions of kids in high school who would have been working under the old laws? You have to hire more teachers, and you have to figure out what they\u2019re going to teach. You then get endless debates about cultural literacy \u2014 about what subjects should be required. Should everyone in high school learn Greek? What about Latin? What about sewing? Or needlepoint? Cursive? And the schools became bigger. The local schoolhouse went away, and the gigantic brick edifice on the edge of town took its place. James Conant, a president of Harvard, decided in the 1960s that the ideal high school should have at least 750 students. That\u2019s a lot of students \u2014 it\u2019s a battalion of students, in fact \u2014 and that\u2019s perhaps where it all began to go wrong. The regional schools became meatpacking plants, or Play-Doh fun factories, squeezing out supposedly educated human beings, marching them around from class to class \u2014 bells bonging, punishments escalating, homework being loaded on. And yet the human beings who were marching from class to class weren\u2019t being paid. \u201cReview the elements of transcendentalism listed on Page 369.\u201d Oh, and do it for free<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Every day something like 16 million high-school students get up at the crack of dawn, slurp some oat clusters while barely conscious, hop on a bus, bounce around the county, show up and sit in a chair, zoned out, waiting for the first bell. If they\u2019re late, they are written up. Even if they don\u2019t do much academic work, they are physically present. Their attendance is a valuable commodity, because if students don\u2019t attend, teachers and guidance counselors and principals and textbook makers and designers of educational software have no jobs. A huge lucrative industry is built around them, and the students get nothing out of it but a G.P.A. They deserve not to have their time wasted.<\/p>\n

And it is wasted, as everyone knows. Teachers spend half their time shouting themselves hoarse, and young adults are infantilized. Their lives are absurdly regimented. Every minute is accounted for. They sit in one hot room after another and wait for each class to end. Time thickens. It becomes like saltwater taffy \u2014 it becomes viscous and sticky, and it stretches out and it folds back on itself through endless repetition. Tuesday is just like Wednesday, except the schedule is shuffled. Day after day of work sheets. By the time they graduate, they\u2019ve done 13 years of work sheets. When they need to go to the bathroom, they have to write their name on a piece of paper by the door. If they hide in the bathroom, they\u2019re in trouble. Whole hierarchies of punishment for scofflaws arise \u2014 school-\u00adsupplied iPads are restricted, parents are called on the phone, in-school suspensions are meted out.<\/p>\n

What makes all this almost tolerable is the kids themselves. They find ways to make it entertaining. They discover friends and co-\u00adconspirators. They rebel. They interrupt one another constantly in search of some tiny juicy Jolly Rancher of surprise. They subvert the system. They learn to lie convincingly to avoid work. The teacher\u2019s aide (sometimes it was me) says, \u201cAre you all caught up?\u201d Kid: \u201cYep.\u201d Aide: \u201cDid you do that BrainPOP about the flipflap of the doodlesquat?\u201d Kid: \u201cYep, handed that in yesterday.\u201d One young man I \u00adtalked to seemed unusually intelligent but downcast. I asked him how he survived his days. He pulled out his earbud, and he said one word: \u201cmusic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nicholson Baker, “Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher”, New York Times Magazine<\/em><\/a>, 2016-09-07.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All teaching takes a toll on what\u2019s taught, but high school is wondrously efficient at making interesting things dull. So why are kids forced to go? Well, one reason has to do with child-\u00adlabor laws. In the middle of the 19th century, kids in most states could stop going to school after eighth grade, once […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,79,41,13],"tags":[374,504],"class_list":["post-35852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-education","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-children","tag-teenagers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9kg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35852"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35853,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35852\/revisions\/35853"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}