School as Hoop-Jumping, and the Failure of Education

I have from time to time discussed here my experience of college teaching--and where college teaching often goes wrong, certainly in those areas where I am most familiar with it (the teaching of college English). Where all this is concerned one can point to failures in the design of curricula and of methods (as with composition teachers who mistake themselves for Zen Masters and run their classes in line with their delusions).

However, that is far from the only source of the problem, with what the student brings with them often an issue as well. Most of the criticism we hear about this has to do with their K-12 preparation, which is a matter not just of what schools fail to instill in their students, but what they them do instill in them instead--a cynicism toward education.

It has long been understand that, besides any narrowly academic content, our schools (designed to prepare workers for employment in nineteenth century mills; education for two centuries ago, today!) go to great lengths to inculcate habits of punctuality, self-restraint, tolerance of boredom, and above all, deference to authority figures. To many it may seem that they do not succeed in all this so well as they ought. However, they succeed in this to a rather greater degree than they do in inculcating a respect for knowledge and an understanding that they may get something useful to them here, such that the so-called "hidden curriculum" of habit inculcation can seem the real curriculum, the only curriculum, as it is the rest of what they are supposed to learn that gets obscured, everything they do really seeming to be about placating these authority figure messing with their lives.

At higher levels of education, where more is demanded of the student intellectually--where unless they can take a genuine interest and make a genuine effort nothing much can be expected--this gets to be a real problem, perhaps especially in classes in the humanities that get so little respect. It seems to me that it should be fairly obvious that, for instance, a composition class intended to aid a student in developing the skills of reading closely, thinking critically, and communicating clearly, can have value to everyone--but no matter what anyone tells those ruined for such training by prior experience, they believe that it is just more hoop-jumping, to be treated accordingly.