The Game of School
Humans are designed, by nature, to learn. We learn through self-directed play and exploration. We learn by doing and by trial and error. We learn when we have a specific need or desire, or when we are physically involved in something. We learn by digging deep into topics of interest. We learn by teaching others and when we see the impact or consequence of what we are learning.
Turns out, the way formal schooling is set up does not match the usual ways humans learn.
We've taken learning out of context by putting it into an institutional framework that prioritizes grades, conformity, and compliance over
joy, curiosity, and exploration. A framework that is disconnected from student’s interests, increasingly irrelevant to what happens in the real world, and largely divorced from what we know about how and why students learn.
While this may work for some kids, for most others learning in this context leads to resistance, corner-cutting, and fixation on grades and credentials. Worse yet, they tend to forget what they “learned,” once they take the test.
Think about your own school experience. How much of the “learning” that happened in school stuck over the years? I’m guessing very little.
That’s because the learning that occurs in formal schooling is mostly an imitation of learning.
Many adults have a hard time seeing this because kids are adaptable and, in an attempt to navigate a flawed system, they pick up on how to do things in order to appear as if they are “learning”. In other words, kids learn to play the game of school.
The game of school is easy to master. Kids quickly pick up on what a “successful student” looks like: they raise their hand every few minutes to get their participation grade, appear to be paying attention in class, and figure out what the teacher wants in order to produce it. They try to get away with doing as little as possible and learn what to do in order to pass the test. Many default to cutting corners so they can get the “learning” out of the way as quickly as possible and head off to do what really matters to them.
Can we blame them? Given the framework we’ve created for school, what incentives do kids have to value “learning” over grades? None that I can see.
The good news is, learning is not strictly limited to what happens in formal schooling. Kids can learn anywhere.
We need to give similar importance to how kids can learn outside of school.
One way to do this is encouraging them to solve problems that they care to solve because they are meaningful to them —and that’s where we’re starting at Synthesis.
I explore ideas like this in Fab Fridays, my newsletter on childhood education and new ways to learn.
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