What Do Students Owe?

Hello clients, readers and students! Welcome to my third blog. I hope you enjoy.

Part I: Words from My Students

They have a lot to say.

“If you take time to even listen to one of them [students], they will tell you they don’t like learning. This is false – learning is not the problem. It is the fact that they are NOT! I ask you why you think it's appropriate to tell a kid that he owes you 6 hours and 25 minutes or more of his time every weekday. Why is it okay to send him home and say he owes you another few hours of homework when he could be living his life? I will tell you it is not okay – it is dangerous to say that students’ lives are based on institutions you create to mold them into mini you’s. It creates an atmosphere of compliance where the goal is to survive the day and leave as soon as possible...If you give a child a strict schedule for his formative years and then abandon him to the world, he becomes prey to people offering structure and order.” 

- A high schooler

Part II: A Reflection

Let’s get deep.

I want to single out two of my student’s points from the quote above.

First, why do schools embrace an educational philosophy that assumes students “owe” us (educators) their time and labor? What purpose does this approach serve? What results does it achieve?

Second, what did my student mean when he said, “If you give a child a strict schedule for his formative years and then abandon him to the world, he becomes prey to people offering structure and order”?

This week’s blog will tackle the first set of questions. Next week’s blog will address the second.

I’ll begin by thinking through what it means to “owe.” We “owe” someone (or some institution) when we a) make them promises without expectation of reciprocal gain, or b) enter willingly into a two-sided agreement with them (meaning each party promises to provide something to the other). The second definition is more applicable for our purposes, so that’s the one we’ll use.

“Owing,” then, is a relationship of mutual obligation, and outside the sphere of family it generally has to be chosen by both parties. It used to be that peasants “owed” labor and goods to their lords from birth (lifelong obedience in exchange for protection), but in modern times we tend to oppose the notion that individuals can be born into all-consuming relationships of material obligation without agreeing to them – especially when those relationships aren’t sufficiently beneficial to one of the parties involved.

This logic holds only partially true, of course, in our relationship with government. Most of us take it for granted that we owe things to the government (taxes, obedience to the law, etc.) and that our government owes things to us (safety, public utilities, the right to life, the right to pursue happiness, etc.). We don’t get to “choose” this relationship – we’re born into it and have no chance to reject it – but the majority of us accept it retroactively, since it’s a huge part of what makes modern life possible.

It’s tempting to lump the time and labor of students into the general category of “things all citizens owe their government in exchange for the benefits of modern life.” And in the US, that’s exactly what we’ve done by mandating school attendance for all children from the ages of 5/6/7 to 16/17/18 (these ages vary state by state). Problematically, though, the rewards of mandatory schooling (k-12) are diminishing for students while the demands schools place upon them are growing – a situation worsened by the fact that students have no say in the amount or type of labor covered by their mandatory “attendance.”

To reiterate, young people gain less and less in exchange for attending school – specifically in terms of intellectual competency and employment prospects – yet education today is more time-consuming and future-determining than ever. In the US, upward mobility is declining and the quality of public education is poor. Students and their families compensate by working harder, paying more (for tutors and name-brand schools), and doing more superficially impressive stuff (e.g., the extra-curricular mania of today’s upper classes). Notice that “more,” not “better,” is the rule here.

Beyond the fact that the returns of school are diminishing, our educational institutions are also becoming actively harmful to students’ health. Along with homework times, youth suicide rates and education-related mental health issues are on the rise.

Are students at least learning more as a result of their increasing workloads? No. Their plates may be full, but most American students are not enjoying the benefits of a high-quality academic diet. That’s because the growing demands of our education system are not intellectual in nature. Students are simply working – and stressing, and procrastinating, and losing sleep – more. They are learning to live reactively.

We can’t blame parents for this. They’re responding reasonably to the conviction that their children’s futures are on the line. We can’t blame teachers either, because at the end of the day, most of them have to do what administrators ask of them. Meanwhile, school administrators are responding to the same “more-is-better” cultural messaging as students and parents, and, being working adults, they understand what our economy is like for those without shiny resumés. Most of them are just doing their best to help. 

So who is to blame? My working answer at the moment is: all of us, for not banding together and standing up for students. I’m still not sure what “banding together” would entail, though. How do you create a cultural shift around the treatment of young people (and the concept of education) in an entire country? I think the first step is to question our collective assumption (it’s more of an attitude, really) that students of all ages owe potentially unlimited time and labor to the education system. It’s time to pin down what is actually reasonable for schools to ask of students, given what students are receiving in exchange.

It’s also time to pin down what is best to ask of students, rather than stopping at the question of “how much” / “how hard” we can get away with working them. What kinds of assignments are most effective at stimulating learning, and for what kinds of students?

After all, there’s a lot at stake in these questions. Schools are sites of incredible potential for the betterment of communities all around the country, and we waste that potential when we turn them into places young people don’t want to be.

That’s all for now, folks (if I don’t stop writing I’ll be here all day). See you next week!

Sincerely,

Your Tutor

Part III: Field Notes

I write these in real-time when teaching.

Lesson w lawyer, 1.__.2021

There is no direct translation of the verb “to daydream” in Spanish.

Lesson w high schooler, 1.__.2021

X is fairly easy to get writing, but he definitely struggles to “hit the mark” when responding to my prompts. I need to spend more time explaining to him the spirit of a question or activity rather than focusing on the letter of it in my instructions.

It’s easy to assume students understand why you’re asking them to do something, or that they understand the broader context of a standard type of prompt, when in fact many of them are unclear on basics such as what a “reading reflection” is supposed to be/do. 

Lesson w elementary schooler, 1.__.2021

X is responding very positively (for now) to practice modules in which I post one or two pictures of a fantasy or sci-fi city (thx DeviantArt) in our Google Doc and ask him to write a story about an imaginary person who lives there. He actually asked if we could continue writing a story he began last lesson as soon as he appeared on-screen today!

After each story is finished, we’ve been editing for mistakes and doing mini grammar and vocabulary lessons based on said mistakes. Seems like that makes X want to learn the grammar, etc. so his stories can get better.