Reasons why school can be anti-learning:

1) No play
2) Artificial incentives
3) Bad teachers
4) Lack of relevance
5) Antique methods
6) Bad test structure
7) Bad traditions
I could write a paragraph about each of these. Ill just touch on a few:
If you give a monkey a puzzle, it will solve it over and over for fun. If you then reward it with a
banana for solving the puzzle, it will stop solving it unless its paid.
Schools were at one point explicitly designed to create good assembly line workers.
Given the importance of their position, teachers usually have _far_ too much job security. There
are some teachers unions that should simply be bulldozed.

Fugacity on 2014/07/30 @ 4:15 pm Reply

Overall I agree with your list and I assume the order was not necessarily in order of greatest to
least impact. Id add some factors to it though. If I were to rank them from highest to lowest in
terms of most common to least common it would be:
1) Politician interference they all think they know how to teach but none of them have been
teachers which results in
2) Antique methods I read a masterful analysis of this recently. Shortly after WW II an
American engineer/statistician/management consultant went to Japan to teach them how to do
better quality control. Using his methods the Japanese transformed made in Japan from a
derogatory term to a mark of quality. In the meantime American manufacturers stuck to the old
ways and suffered declining market share. The same has happened in education. Some great
methods of teaching have been developed, tested, and proven in the USA and exported to other
countries where they are used with great success, but are used only sporadically here in the USA.
Instead its a constant shift from one fad to the next, usually just going back to the antique
methods which leads to
3) Lack of relevance we still need good assembly line workers, but most people need to be
grounded in high tech even the assembly line workers. We also need skilled I repeat
SKILLED mechanics, technicians, machinists, welders, engineers, computer technicians,
engineers, entrepreneurs, etc. We need people who know the key information by rote yes
memorizing times table is still a good skill but we also need people to understand WHY math
works the way it does and WHY good technical writing is good writing and so on. As much
furor as Common Core has created, its actually a step in the right direction, but its a change and
people seem to hate change and people start to politicize it and try to push for a return to antique

methods that just dont work so well.

4) Constantly changing directives (yeah this is not on Phoenixs list but I think it should be
added) I pity the poor teachers who walk into the classroom every year with a brand new change
of direction coming down from the district or state or whatever. How on earth are they ever
supposed to get good at a method if its thrown out the next year and they have to start a new
method with a couple of weeks (or often a couple of hours) of vague, confusing training? How
are parents supposed to keep up with whats going on so they can help out their students? This is
one of the reasons for
5) Abdication of responsibility for education. There are plenty of helicopter parents who are
over-involved in what is going in with their childs education, but for every one of those there
are 10 who shove their kids out the door and figure it is up to the schools to educate and motivate
their kids. Its rather common when a kid gets into trouble or does poorly at school to
immediately and adamantly blame someone else instead of considering that maybe its the kids
fault, or maybe, *gasp* the parents. Great teachers can make a huge difference, but even
ordinary, good teachers can have a big impact when supported by the parents at home who show
up to parent/teacher conferences, follow what the kids are doing in school, encourage the kids to
do their homework, and hold the KIDS accountable. It also makes a difference when parents and
the community actively support the idea that it is critical to get educated. The best example of
this I can find the anomaly of the state of Utah which spends less per pupil than most of the US
and yet has one of the highest levels of academic achievement in the US. They dont have better
teachers. They dont have better facilities. They dont have inherently better kids. They arent
more affluent. They dont have better teaching methods. What they DO have is higher
expectations for the kids and more in-family accountability. They also have one of the lowest
drop-out rates possibly because it is less socially acceptable there to drop out. Perhaps bad
traditions could be lumped in with this category.
6) Bad test structure. This has been a problem forever. I once associated closely with a guy who
got his Ph.D in education (not Ed.D. Ph.D. gotta use SCIENCE to get that one) working on
effective testing. He taught me about how poorly most tests are designed when it comes to
testing what they are supposed to be testing. I utilized what he taught me to make the tests I
wrote for college students better and wound up getting an award from the students for my
teaching. Weird how actually getting tested on what you are supposed to be learning will make
you feel better about the work you are doing in a class, eh? In some ways this could be lumped
together with artificial incentives. If tests effectively demonstrate what youve learned, you
feel more incentive to learn it, with confidence that the effort you put into it will show up when
you take the test and that the score you see is not just luck.
7) The last one I would put is bad teachers. There are certainly some out there. I taught grad
school, undergraduate, high school, and middle school. I was a good college teacher. I was a
poor high school and middle school teacher (I dont teach middle school or high school any
more). Interestingly, the principal at the high school had no clue when I told him that teaching
high school was different from teaching college but then hed only spent two years as a teacher
in a middle school. Most teachers are actually quite good and stick around because they care.
Poor teachers usually quit because they are miserable. That said, some good teachers burn out or
get so overloaded with the extraneous demands placed on them that their teaching suffers. Given
the importance of their positions and difficulty of their job, most teachers are grossly underpaid.
Most teachers I know work 50-60 hours per week just to keep up with the demands of their job;
time to hone their skills has to come on top of that. Their job security is a poor substitute for

decent compensation. I suppose it might be a result of people assuming that ANYONE can teach.
It would be a rude awakening for most of those pointing fingers at the teachers for academic
failures if they had to step into the shoes of the teachers and deal with the massive bureaucracy,
ridiculous politics, undisciplined students, unmotivated students, emotional baggage of students
coming from dysfunctional homes, lack of appreciation, constant criticism and second guessing
of everything they do, oh and then also do lesson plans, coordinate with other teachers, teach,
and grade in the time they have left over.
Reaver on 2014/07/31 @ 12:44 am Reply
My mother is an English teacher, and she effectively has to be the parent some of her students
never had because of poor family life, and even some of those students almost made her quit
because they were so terrible. She cannot afford teacher union rates because the rates are
effectively extortion, her department is run by a skeleton crew because no one thinks the English
department needs money, and her head is on the chopping block for being fired, not because she
is a bad teacher (she is a wonderful teacher) but because of some really ugly and backhanded
politics (said politics are also why half my town is screaming for the superintendent to get fired,
but never will). Also, they are keeping certain science teachers who NEED to be thrown back to
college for being absolutely TERRIBLE teachers, but because they do their paperwork
flawlessly and give easy passing grades they have more job security than if they had tenure (I say
this because they fired three people who HAD tenure in two years for stepping on toes privately).
It is because of this I unashamedly HATE the current school system and just how destructive it
is. The fact that there is an extreme greater emphasis on politics 90% of the people dont know
about rather than 100% of the children currently in the school system is both disgusting and
saddening.
Sorry for the flame, schools are a touchy subject for me now.