My son finds homework painfully aversive, as I did before him. But I cut him much less slack than I was given as a kid.
School is often arbitrary, pointless, and tedious. It's part of a large system that needs to serve many different interests, several of them legitimate. That's modern life. We're not so much beset by wolves and bears; instead, we have to deal with systems and social/cultural obligations. And while I don't so much care if the boy emerges from high school remembering all the Latin declensions or the details of the Treaty of Ghent, he's at least going to be familiar with what it takes to play the system.
For whatever it's worth: when I pay attention to his homework, I rarely find it pointless. And in the classes most imperiled by pointlessness, there homework usually takes the form of essays. And there is nothing in the world more valuable than being able to express ideas in writing. So he writes the essays, and I make him do drafts and drafts and drafts.
> he's at least going to be familiar with what it takes to play the system.
That comment makes your perspective the complete opposite of the author's. The author kid moves his chess pieces randomly and the author writes a blog post about how the rules are not fair. You likely teach that sometimes you have to follow the rules to play the game.
This blog post reads like like a fool arguing that the rules of chess are stupid.
If the world actually followed school-like rules, your analogy would be useful. But it doesn't.
The recipe for "winning" the game of school is:
- follow directions very carefully
- be good at memorizing things
- never challenge authority
The market value of being able to carefully follow directions is nearly zero, and falling fast. That was a useful skill back when there were lots of good-paying factory jobs. Now it just makes you an excellent candidate for being replaced by software.
The market value of being able to memorize easily searchable facts is nearly zero, and falling even faster. Any test that can be "cheated" by using Wikipedia is testing a totally useless skill. (Useful tests are still hard when you have access to all the internet.)
As for obedience to authority, I'll stick with Thoreau: "Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
The evidence around us is overwhelming. Look at all the unemployed college graduates: those are the people who learned how to play the game, when they could have been learning something useful instead.
First, that's not actually the only recipe for "winning" the game of school; it's just the one that occurs most vividly to people who dislike school. I disliked school too, and did poorly at it, approaching it as a system only solvable by the approach you outlined.
Now that I'm a couple decades removed from attending school, it's obvious --- painfully obvious, like so much that I often see opportunities that my son won't give a chance that make me want to shake him --- that if you pay attention to the directions and give even a little thought to how you might push on the apparent constraints the school provides, school is eminently playable.
Second, the point of learning how to play the school system isn't to be good at school. It's to be good at handling systems in general. Different systems, different constraints, but there are meta-lessons to be learned in dealing with any of them.
Indeed, school is very, very playable. Here's one anecdote from my personal experience:
One of high school English teachers was notoriously hard on guys. It was generally understood that she considered them goof-offs and slackers, and didn't give good grades to guys even for really hard work. I was at a disadvantage in that class even before I walked in the door.
So rather than fight an uphill battle due to my gender, I spent an extra hour on the first report (a paper on Romeo and Juliet) and carefully drew hearts and a large rose in colored pencil on the cover page. I then proceeded to behave a smidge more effeminately than my natural self whenever speaking to her, and breezed through that year while my male classmates struggled, with my teacher convinced I was a persecuted homosexual.
I'm not convinced it was helpful in the long term, because the work I avoided in that class didn't do me any favors. I've never done particularly well in English classes since, despite my love of reading and an over-sized vocabulary. But it certainly did give me an appreciation for the malleability of rules and systems when they are administered by imperfect humans.
Oh, I know it's eminently playable, because I played it like a fiddle. I did extremely well, while investing the minimum effort required.
My only secret for excelling at school was that my natural interests happened to coincide with the things school expects you to do. So I was intrinsically motivated to do most of them, and whenever intrinsically motivated people compete with extrinsically motivated people, it's hardly a competition at all.
Motivation dominates all other factors in learning. Nothing else comes close. People who want to learn something learn it orders of magnitude faster and more reliably than people who don't really care. Piles of psychological research back this up.
For example, if you actually wait to teach a child arithmetic until he or she expresses a genuine interest, a typical child can master all of elementary school math in about 20 hours of instruction. Reading is similar -- once the fire is lit, with a little phonetic guidance, a typical kid can become a fluent reader in weeks, not months.
So the real art of education becomes inspiring the desire, and then being ready to strike when the iron is hot. School actively thwarts this pattern.
> Second, the point of learning how to play the school system isn't to be good at school. It's to be good at handling systems in general. Different systems, different constraints, but there are meta-lessons to be learned in dealing with any of them.
That kind of general experience is something you get no matter what you're doing, so long as you're interacting with other human beings. The real question is whether school teaches better meta-lessons than other kinds of experience.
In school, all work is simulated. The worst and best possible outcomes are both abstract letters on a piece of paper. Contrast this with something as simple as putting a child in charge of planning a camping trip, and the variety of outcomes they'll experience and learn from. Nothing teaches responsibility like having to explain to your friends that you forgot to pack breakfast.
He is biologically prevented from understanding some of these reasons as his prefrontal cortext is still not fully developed. At least, that's how I understand it.
The recipe for "winning" the game of school is: - follow directions very carefully - be good at memorizing things - never challenge authority
This is an appealing theory, and I know lots of people who think it is true. However the "never challenge authority" bit poorly describes the people that I know who did best at school.
Respect authority? Sure. Follow the rules you're ordered to follow? Sure. But question authority, ridicule authority, and be a general PITA? That describes several very good students that I knew!
It really depends on what you mean by 'winning'. I would argue that in many cases 'winning' means keeping your head down and getting out alive at the other end with the necessary grades you need and the absolute minimum of effort along the way. To achieve that goal openly questioning authority is almost always counter productive. It's almost always better to either ignore authority, work around authority or work with authority than to challenge authority.
Sure you can be a PITA if you want, but unless you're the sort of person who loves being a PITA for its own reward (I was, to my shame), it probably won't get you anything meaningful.
Seconded. You can challenge authority without actually getting in trouble. It just requires having a modicum of legitimacy and reasonableness in your request. Having people skills can help too.
Many friends I know got through very well because they knew the rules of the game, and notably got some exceptional treatment because they made sure that they were taken seriously by the administration. One way not to do that is to be completely insufferable and unreasonably stubborn(which is how a lot of teenage kids act, granted).
The market value of being able to memorize easily searchable facts is nearly zero, and falling even faster. Any test that can be "cheated" by using Wikipedia is testing a totally useless skill. (Useful tests are still hard when you have access to all the internet.)
Memorization is not useless! The ability to access certain information in sub-speed latency is a valuable skill and should be learnt. This is called cached knowledge. One defining example is the multiplication table that we have to memorialize as a kid.
Searching is definitely useful, but the basic you should memorize, because you will use them over and over again. Do not be a programmer at work who have to repetitively google information several times a day that should be second nature because he refuse to memorize.
> the basic you should memorize, because you will use them over and over again
But that's a self-solving problem. Anything you truly use over and over again will become readily memorized. And people are demonstrably good at memorizing that kind of information.
My issue is with memorizing things that the learner has no intrinsic motivation to memorize.
> follow directions very carefully - be good at memorizing things - never challenge authority
I have yet to meet a smart person that can't do these things with ease. The only modification I would make, is to "only challenge authority when it is in your best interest to do so." It is generally best to go around authority or ignore it if the consequences are manageable. Challenging authority is generally a waste of time.
"But I cut him much less slack than I was given as a kid."
Could work great. Could also end up inhibiting his executive function and turning him into a heroin addict.
The formula for success is multiplicative: Ability * Motivation * Opportunity.
If any one of those factors is zero, success is zero despite how much of the others you have. The thing about forcing kids to do their homework is there's no such thing as a free lunch. Whatever you gain in terms of extra external opportunity may be easily offset (and then some) by reductions in intrinsic motivation, executive function, etc. Or not. The point is that it's a wicked problem[1], and as such there isn't any simple and/or one-size-fits-all solution. Keep in mind also that doing well is largely beneficial because it gives you more opportunities to do various things. But thanks to new social structures that are being built on top of the Internet, those sorts of opportunities are becoming less and less valuable every day. While having them will always be better than not having them, it may no longer make sense to optimize for them either, especially when you're young enough to have a decades-long arc.
Although I am somewhat less enamored with him now that I used to be, I think John Taylor Gatto's list of 14 things that elite private schools teach that public schools don't is by far the best list of things to focus on for high school age kids:
Gatto's ideas about education are based on history and spirituality (esp. Christianity) rather than science, which can be somewhat offputting at first, but having read the best of the sciency books on the various aspects of childhood development and education I generally think Gatto has more to offer. (Not that the other books aren't good too, but they're generally more useful for designing education systems that scale rather than parenting, except for when the kid is less than five which it doesn't sound like yours are.)
I'm curious, do you ever have discussions with him where you make it clear that you know he is "playing the game" so to speak, or do you also try and hold up the charade? (I know it's less black and white than that, I'm speaking in extremes to make a clear question.)
Like all teenagers, he is capable of of reason, judgement, introspective listening, and a sense of how he actually fits into the cosmos. In 5-10 minute bursts.
In other words: I might as well be the teacher addressing the question of whether the dog has the Buddha-nature. I try, but realistically. And then I make him write the papers.
You're making a flippant comment, but as I think all parents know, there is a baseline level of compliance you can safely expect to achieve for reasonable effort. What if your kid doesn't like "going to school in the morning"? What if your kid doesn't like "turning the lights out and trying to go to sleep after 1:00AM"?
It is worth recognizing the difference between compliance that comes at great cost and compliance that doesn't. In my case: I'll live with late assignments and mediocre grades, as long as the assignments eventually get done, in one giant batch with me checking them off if need be.
I ask because I personally know a handful of people who dropped out of high school to take on high paying jobs, some athletic and some technical. If your kid is intelligent and has a passion for something that deviates from traditional paths, what should you do?
School is often arbitrary, pointless, and tedious. It's part of a large system that needs to serve many different interests, several of them legitimate. That's modern life. We're not so much beset by wolves and bears; instead, we have to deal with systems and social/cultural obligations. And while I don't so much care if the boy emerges from high school remembering all the Latin declensions or the details of the Treaty of Ghent, he's at least going to be familiar with what it takes to play the system.
For whatever it's worth: when I pay attention to his homework, I rarely find it pointless. And in the classes most imperiled by pointlessness, there homework usually takes the form of essays. And there is nothing in the world more valuable than being able to express ideas in writing. So he writes the essays, and I make him do drafts and drafts and drafts.