The Problem with School

This is not an article about why school is bad. School is not bad. For most children, for most of history, school has been one of the most equalising and empowering institutions human society has developed. But school, as it currently operates in most parts of the world, has significant structural problems that affect your child. Understanding them is the first step to working intelligently within and around them.

School Optimises for the Average

Schools are designed for the average student, the one in the middle of the distribution. The curriculum is calibrated for them, the pace is set for them, the teaching is directed at them. This means that students significantly above or below the average are systematically underserved. The very able student is bored and under-challenged. The struggling student is perpetually behind. Both groups lose, and together they constitute a very large proportion of any classroom.

School Confuses Compliance with Learning

The behaviours that get rewarded in school, sitting quietly, following instructions, producing the right answer on demand, meeting deadlines, are broadly the behaviours of compliance. They are useful behaviours. But they are not the same as learning. A school system that rewards compliance can inadvertently produce children who are very good at giving teachers what they want without developing genuine understanding.

School Cannot Know Your Child

A good teacher, in a class of twenty-five or thirty students, cannot know each child the way that child needs to be known. This is not a criticism of teachers. It is a structural reality. The child's particular way of learning, their specific gaps, their emotional state on any given day, the things that motivate or discourage them, these are largely invisible to an institution operating at scale.

What This Means for Parents

Understanding the structural limitations of school allows you to work intelligently around them. Your child will spend roughly twelve years inside the school system. That system will serve them reasonably well in some ways and not at all in others. Your job as a parent is to know which is which, and to fill the gaps the system cannot fill. Not by adding more school-like activity at home, but by bringing a different kind of attention: knowing your child as an individual, not as a student.