EQI.org Home Wounded by School
How Does
School Wound? Kirsten Olson Has Counted Some WaysDr.
Kirsten Olsons interviews identified seven kinds of
school wounds.
Published on June 28, 2011 by Peter Gray in Freedom to
Learn
Let me introduce you to Dr. Kirsten Olson. She is an
educational researcher, activist, consultant, and writer
deeply concerned about children, learning, and the
conditions of our schools. She is, among other things,
president of the board of directors of IDEA (the
Institute for Democratic Education in America). I met her
for the first time, for lunch and conversation, a couple
of weeks ago, and then I eagerly read her latest book,
Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and
Standing up to Old School Culture. If you have ever gone
to school, or have a child in school, or might someday
have a child in school, or care about children in school,
I recommend her book to you.
Wounded by School is the outcome of research that Olson
began when she was an education doctoral candidate at
Harvard. As one who loves learning and has always had
high esteem for education, Olson intended to conduct
research into the delights and enlightenment experienced
in the course of schooling. But when she began
interviewing people to learn about such positive effects,
she found that they talked instead about the pain of
school. Here is how Olson's doctoral advisor, Sara
Laurence-Lightfoot put it in a forward to the book:
"In her first foray into the field--in-depth
interviews with an award-winning architect, a
distinguished professor, a gifted writer, a marketing
executive--Olson certainly expected to hear stories of
joyful and productive learning, stories that mixed
seriousness, adventure, and pleasure, work and play,
desire and commitment. Instead, she discovered the
shadows of pain, disappointment, even cynicism in their
vivid recollections of schooling. Instead of the light
that she expected, she found darkness. And their stories
did not merely refer to old wounds now healed and long
forgotten; they recalled deeply embedded wounds that
still bruised and ached, wounds that still compromised
and distorted their sense of themselves as persons and
professionals."
As her project expanded, Olson began interviewing people
of all ages, from schoolchildren on up to grandparents,
people from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and
occupying a wide variety of careers. She was struck by
the earnestness and emotion that came forth as people
talked about the wounds that they still felt in relation
to their schooling. Olson was pioneering a direct way to
understand the effects of school on psychological
development. She asked people who had been there how
school affected them.
In her book, Olson categorizes the wounds into seven
groups, and she illustrates each with quotations from
interviews. Then, in later chapters, she describes how
caring parents, teachers, and students themselves can
help prevent and heal the wounds. Here I'll simply list
and describe in my own words Olson's seven categories.
(I've added my own twist to the description of each type
of wound, so if you find fault in the descriptions, the
faults may be mine rather than Olson's.)
The first four categories of wounds all seem to result
primarily from the restrictions that are placed on
students' behavior and learning in school--the preset
curriculum, the narrow set of permissible learning
procedures, the tests in which there is one right answer
for every question, and the often-arbitrary rules that
students have no role in creating. These categories are:
1. Wounds of creativity. School stifles creativity. This
is perhaps the most obvious wound of school. Students'
own passions and interests are generally ignored.
Students' unique, creative ways of solving problems and
their outside-the-box answers to questions, which fail to
match the teachers' answer sheets, are not understood and
are graded as wrong by busy teachers. Rote learning and
tests that have one right answer for every question leave
no room for creativity. Olson's informants who went on to
live creative lives apparently did so despite, not
because of, schooling. They had to recover or rebuild the
creative spirit that had been so natural to them before
starting school. My own guess is that altogether too many
others rarely think about creativity once they have lost
it in school; they may not even notice this wound. And
then there are those who remain creative in those realms
that school doesn't touch, but become uncreative in the
realms covered by the school curriculum. How many people
have totally lost mathematical creativity because of the
ways it was taught in school?
2. Wounds of compliance. In school students must
continuously follow rules and procedures that they have
no role in creating and must complete assignments that
make no sense in terms of their own learning needs.
Students generally cannot question these rules and
assignments; if they do they are smart-alecks, or worse.
To avoid getting into trouble, they learn to obey
blindly, and in the process they learn to be bad citizens
in a democracy. Democracy requires citizens who question
the rules and insist on changing those that are unfair or
don't make sense. They also hurt themselves by going
through life following narrower paths than they might if
school had not taught them that it is dangerous to
explore the edges.
3. Wounds of rebellion. Some students respond to the
arbitrary rules and assignments by rebelling rather than
complying. They may in some cases feel intense anger
toward the system that has taken away their freedom and
dignity, toward teachers who seem to be complicit with
that system, and toward the goody-goody students who go
along. They may manifest their scorn by sitting in the
back of the classroom, making snide remarks, blatantly
flouting rules, and rarely if ever completing
assignments. Rebellion may sometimes be a healthier
response than compliance, but if it goes too far it may
hurt even more than compliance. Failure in school may cut
off valued future paths. Anger toward schooling can lead
to a turning away from all forms of learning. And,
perhaps most tragically, the rebellion can take forms
that physically harm the self and others, especially if
the person turns to drugs, promiscuous sex, and crime as
forms of self-expression and self-identity.
4. Wounds of numbness. The constant grind of school,
doing one tedious assignment after another according to
the school's schedule, following the school's procedures,
can lead to intellectual numbness. Many of Olson's
respondents described themselves as "zoned out"
or "intellectually numb" as long as they were
in school. Intellectual excitement is rarely rewarded in
school, but doggedly grinding it out, doing what you are
supposed to do, never missing a deadline, is rewarded.
Brilliant work in one subject at the expense of ignoring
another might earn you an A and an F in the two classes;
but good-enough, non-inspired work in both subjects might
earn you an A in both. This is one of the many ways by
which schooling kills intellectual enthusiasm. When
students do demonstrate enthusiasm, it is usually about
something that has nothing to do with their lessons.
The remaining three categories of wounds identified by
Olson all seem to be inflicted by the ways that people
are ranked and sorted in school. You can be wounded
differently depending on whether you are ranked low,
high, or middling.
5. Wounds of underestimation. In her interviews Olson
found that some described ways in which they were wounded
by assumptions made about them because of their race,
social class, gender, or performance on one or another
test that was supposed to measure intelligence or
aptitude. In some cases, it seemed easier to go along
with the assumption than to fight it, so the assumption
became a self-fulfilling prophecy. More generally, a low
grade achieved in a course or set of courses can unduly
discourage people from following what had been their
dream. A would-be biologist chooses a less-desired track
because of a D in tenth grade biology. A would-be author
concludes that professional writing is beyond her scope
because an English teacher could not see the sparkle of
her essays or the brilliance in her non-conventional
sentence structure and gave her below-average grades. If
only students knew how many great achievers in our
society received poor school grades in the realm of their
achievement! If only teachers knew.
--
Peter Gray, a
research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a
specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology
and author of an introductory textbook, Psychology.
Dr. Kirsten Olsons interviews identified seven
kinds of school wounds. Coercive teaching is always an
act of aggression The important lessons from
hunter-gatherers are about culture, not genes. How
hunter-gatherers taught without coercion. What can we
learn from animals by watching them teach?
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