Elizabeth Knudsen

We are exhausted. We are stressed and anxious. We are depressed. We are born with curiosity and given a straightjacket. We are led to believe the sacrifice of our emotional and physical wellbeing is worth twelve years of standardized schooling. We think all we need to know is found in the heavy textbooks that strain our spines (Warner) in our pursuit of facts we forget in a week. This is how the secondary educational system is structured. And it is hurting us. G.K. Chesterton once said “The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive the common people of their common sense” (Pearce). The American public school system is detrimental to the mental and emotional wellbeing of students.

The struggle for educational reform in America has existed for hundreds of years. In colonial New England, education was considered a local responsibility. But education soon started its shift toward being under the government’s control, and as early as 1647, Massachusetts law mandated every town of 50 or more families had to have a school, and every town of 100 or more families must have a Latin school to ensure Puritan children learn to read the Bible and receive basic information about their Calvinist religion. After the American Revolution in 1779, Thomas Jefferson argued the school system should be tax-funded and should teach more than just basic skills and build knowledge of the classics, sciences, and education for citizenship. This was called a two-track educational system (“Historical Timeline”). His pleas were ignored, and local schools continued as the norm in the early days of the U.S. As for teachers, a 1789 Massachusetts law dictated school masters must have a college education and produce a certificate of qualifications and good morals from an established minister or selectman. Despite this, schools were often taught by people whose credentials were often self-exampled knowledge (like Laura Ingalls). The same year this law was passed, another required public schools to serve females as well as males. In 1790 the Pennsylvania state constitution called for free public education, but only for poor children (“Historical Timeline”). The literacy rate of both men and women, who were often home taught, was higher than that of European countries in early America (Iorio 3).

According to raceforward.org, in 1805, “New York Public School Society was formed by wealthy businessmen to provide education for poor children. Schools were run on the ‘Lancasterian’ model, in which one ‘master’ taught hundreds of students in a single room. These schools emphasized discipline and obedience; qualities that factory owners wanted in their workers.” 1820 saw the opening of the first public high school in the U.S., Boston English. Seven years afterwards Massachusetts made all levels of public schooling free. In the 1840s Irish Catholics in New York City fought for local neighborhood control of schools in an attempt to prevent their children from being force-fed a Protestant curriculum. Massachusetts passed its first compulsory school law in 1851 anyway in an attempt to educate the poorer children of foreign immigrants flooding into the U.S., and New York followed suit the year after. By 1865 the number of public schools had increased massively, but the level of education available varied and compulsory attendance did not exist nation-wide. Grammar books called Readers were the dominant form of learning for the reading, writing, and arithmetic core, but school reformers eventually influenced the inclusion of spelling, geography, history, the U.S. Constitution, nature study, physical education, art, and music (Iorio 4).

A set of principles called Scientific Management were introduced to the education system by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor encouraged employers to reorganize for maximum efficiency by subdividing tasks, speeding production, and making workers more interchangeable. This theory of mass production with minimum cost was applied to schooling. It is Taylor we have to thank for standardized records of efficiency ratings, standardized tests, building score cards, teaching loads, standardized conditions of school buildings and classrooms, standardized operations for school personnel and students, and monetary rewards for teachers whose students meet assigned goals. Students were taught by drills, memorization, and regimented routines (Iorio 9).

Progressive educators, such as John Dewey, were swept up in the national enthusiasm for industrial education. The Report of the Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education in 1906 claimed the “old-fashioned” type of schooling that existed before the progressive movement caused large numbers of children to leave school early, unprepared to be useful citizens. The commission recommended the majority of children should be trained in school with vocational and commercial studies for jobs in industry, instead of “literary education.” For women, occupations such as clerks, teachers, and nurses were emphasized (Iorio 11).

By the late 1940s many public schools had either partially or wholly embraced progressive schooling, but during the post-Cold War era it lost favor when questions were raised about the liberal roots of its reforms. Rudolf Flesch’s popular study Why Can’t Johnny Read (1955) claimed the progressive “reading in context” approach was inadequate preparation for the next generation of Americans (Iorio 13).

The heir to progressive education movement was constructivism, which argues children are active participants in making meaning and must be engaged in the educational process to effectively learn. In the late ’60s, the open classroom movement seemed to be moving away from Taylor’s industrialism. In this movement, students and teachers worked together without walls separating classrooms, regardless of age or grade level. This helped revitalize some of Dewey’s child-centered reforms. It was James B. Conant, however, who argued for a national testing program and an educational achievement index, and increased federal support for vocational guidance in public schools (Iorio 13, 14).

Recently, institutions like Magnet schools (competitive schools often focusing on a particular vocation) have spread across the nation (Iorio 22). Widespread homeschooling ended with the compulsory attendance laws of the 1800s but has steadily been gaining popularity since the 1960s (Iorio 24). During the Clinton administration, the GOALS 200: Educate America Act became law as an attempt to bolster reform. By 2001 only 22 states had adopted these promoted standards. These goals required high school students to take at least four years of English, three years of math, three years of science, three years of history and/or social studies, half a year of computer science, and college-bound students were required to take two years of a foreign language. By the year 2000, most states had not achieved the Goals 2000 mandate (Iorio 24, 25). Such attempts and failures continued with the presidency of George W. Bush with NCLB (No Child Left Behind) and the “adequate yearly progress” (AYP), the goal of a 100% pass rate by the academic year 2013-2014 (Iorio 25). Any school that does not reach AYP for five years could be closed. As goals for reading and math proficiency become more rigorous, more schools are unable to make AYP and more and more schools face impending reorganization or closure (Iorio 26). In March of 2011 the Washington Post reported more than three-quarters of all public schools in America could be labeled as “failing” based on AYP.

This ever constant struggle and seeming back-and-forth between government and business-centered education and localized education has brought us to where we are today. That is, a mind-numbing machine that very rarely allows for the existence of any personal knowledge or talent. As Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognized leader in the development of innovation and human resources once said, “We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.” This is where the public education system exists today.

My thesis is relevant because the next generation — the poorly educated ones graduating from public schools now — are going to be in charge of reforms in the future. These reforms could have a huge impact on the way schooling is done everywhere in America. We can’t hide in the bubble of a private Christian school forever. It is up to us to change the education system now, and for the better, for the sake of our future and our children’s future.

The key terms for my thesis are “education,” “learning,” “compulsory” or “mandatory,” and “mental health.” “Education” is defined by the Encyclopædia Britannica as “discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various non-formal and informal means of socialization.” “Learning” is defined as “the alteration of behavior as a result of individual experience,” also by Britannica. “Compulsory” or “mandatory” is defined by Merriam-Webster as “required by law or rule.” “Mental health” is defined by MentalHealth.gov as “our emotional, psychological, and social well-being.” These are the key terms for my thesis the American public school system is detrimental to the emotional and physical wellbeing of students.

I will prove three arguments to confirm my thesis. First, the structure of the public educational system is detrimental to students. Second, the public educational system is hurting those in it right now. Third, the public school system produces detrimental societal expectations.

I will also refute three counterarguments against my thesis. First, if education is not compulsory, children will not learn. Second, trigger warnings are helpful for people who have suffered traumatic experiences. Third, the stress high-schoolers are made to endure will prepare them for later life.

My first argument is the structure of the public educational system is detrimental to students. This is manifest in the existence of mandatory attendance and excessiveness of testing. In my narration, I defined the terms “learning” and “education” separately. This is because popular society too often believes learning only occurs in a highly structured educational system. This leads to the two entirely different words becoming synonymous in one’s vocabulary. Education should not be mandatory because one cannot force a person to learn. Many students feel they are forced to go to school (which in most cases they are), and they rebel by not putting any effort into learning what they are taught. This occurs because they have to go, but don’t want to. Students like these are a distraction to those who do want to learn and to the teachers. If given the opportunity to leave and enter the work force or even simply vocational training, perhaps they would then see the value of an education and return of their own free will, this time taking responsibility for their lives and choices. And even if they chose not to return, with the students who aren’t interested in learning “freed” from the classroom, the teachers would have more time and energy to focus on improving the quality of education for those who chose to stay. School should certainly be available for primary and secondary school students (through 12^th grade), but it should certainly not be mandatory. People cannot be made to care about anything, and they cannot be forced to learn. If school were not mandatory, perhaps the students in the system wouldn’t dread it so much.

Mandatory attendance also eliminates better alternatives and opportunities some students would be far more interested and successful in. The school system may partially acknowledge some students have unique gifts, and offer the basic AP or Honors classes to try and accommodate them, but in the end a standardized, mandatory system just doesn’t know what to do with advanced children. A mandatory system doesn’t account for personal learning paces or strong and weak areas. It is merely an attempt to make sure all the children in America have an at least basic knowledge of something or other.

The public school system, as it is, focuses almost ad nauseum on preparing for “the real world,” giving students unrealistic, materialistic expectations for the life they’re guaranteed to have if they stay the course for twelve, fourteen, eighteen, or more years of schooling. But the fact is the only way those high expectations could ever be achieved is through actual hard work at a real job and a little dash of magic thrown in.

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama proposed “that every state — every state — requires that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.” He claimed the reason for this was “When students are not allowed to drop out, they do better,” (“State of”). But the fact is, states with higher compulsory school attendance (CSA) ages do not have higher graduation rates than states with lower CSA ages. Based on an analysis by Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow in Governance Studies and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution and Sara Whitfield, a Financial and Administrative Assistant in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, with or without demographic controls, states with CSA until age 18 have graduation rates 1- to 2-percent lower than the states that only require attendance until age 16 or 17. This has been a steady trend since the 2008-2009 school year (Whitehurst and Whitfield). Mandatory attendance doesn’t just harm the students in the system; it doesn’t even accomplish its purpose in the first place.

Another detriment from the structure of American public schools is the overabundance of testing. Testing does not display knowledge. It merely displays how well a student is at taking tests. Testing does not promote learning. It promotes the downloading of facts into our brains to pull up whenever it will help us pass a test. The American school system is drowning in tests. From individual subject tests, to exams, to SOLs, to the PSAT, to the SAT — a student’s high school career is almost built upon taking harder and harder tests. Dawn Neely-Randall, teacher for more than 25 years in Ohio, told The Washington Post in a 2014 interview she was “sick and tired of the effects that obsessive standardized testing is having on her students.” Neely-Randall said her time and ability to actually teach her fifth-grade students how to read and write was being constantly interrupted by a series of required tests — amounting to over eight hours of testing. She wrote:

Tests, tests, and more freakin’ tests.

And this is how I truly feel in my teacher’s heart: the state is destroying the cherished seven hours I have been given to teach my students reading and writing each week, and these children will never be able to get those foundational moments back. Add to that the hours of testing they have already endured in years past, as well as all the hours of testing they still have facing them in the years to come. I consider this an unconscionable a theft of precious childhood time. . .

. . . Many students didn’t speak out as much as they acted out. Cried. Gave their parents a hard time about going to school. Disengaged in class. Got physically sick. Or became a discipline problem. Struggling students struggled even more (Strauss).

This emphasis on testing must be replaced with an emphasis on learning if students are to remember their high school years with anything but dread.

My second confirmation point to prove my thesis is the public educational system is hurting those in it right now, both psychologically and physically. Psychologically, this can be shown in anxiety levels, the seeming epidemic of teenage depression and Attention Deficit or Hyperactivity Disorder. According to The Washington Post, “Fully 83 percent of teenagers said school was ‘a somewhat or significant source of stress.’ Twenty-seven reported ‘extreme stress’ during the school year, though that number fell to 13 percent in the summer. And 10 percent felt stress had a negative impact on their grades” (Shapiro). In a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association in 2014, the stress levels of teenagers even rival those of adults — especially during the school year. When asked to rate their stress on a scale of 1 to 10, teenagers’ stress levels far exceeded what is thought to be healthy during the school year (an average of 5.8 versus 3.9) and this tops the average adult’s stress level (5.8 for teenagers as opposed to 5.1 for adults). 31% of teenagers also reported feeling overwhelmed by stress, and 30% feel depressed or sad as a result of stress. 36% of teens report fatigue or feeling tired, and nearly a quarter (23%) report skipping a meal due to stress. Despite these statistics, teens are more likely to claim their levels of stress are not detrimental to their physical health (54% of teenagers as opposed to 39% of adults) or their mental health (52% versus 43%) than adults; meaning that while it affects teenagers more, they complain about stress less and are unaware of the harm it is causing them. According to the survey, not many teens claim their stress is decreasing. While 16% reported a decrease, 31% reported an increase in their stress levels, and 34% believe their stress level will increase in the coming year. Almost half of teenagers (42%) are not sure if they are doing enough to manage their stress. More than 1 in 10 (13%) say they never even set aside time to manage stress. These numbers may seem small, but the effects of stress can be extremely detrimental to the development of teenagers (“American Psychology”).

Considering a large amount of teenagers’ time is being consumed by schooling, it is not hard to tie these high levels of stress back to being overworked and over-tested. In a 2014 study of Californian schools published in the Journal of Experimental Education by Denise Pope, senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, researchers sought to examine the relationship between homework load and student well-being and engagement, as well as to understand how homework can act as a stressor in students’ lives. Research showed excessive homework is associated with high stress levels, physical health problems, and lack of balance in children’s lives; 56% of the students in the study cited homework as a primary stressor in their lives. Pope wrote, “We found a clear connection between the students’ stress and physical impacts — migraines, ulcers and other stomach problems, sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and weight loss” (Enayati). On average, teens report sleeping much less than the recommended amount — 7.4 hours on school nights and 8.1 hours on nights they don’t have school, as opposed to the 8.5 to 9.25 hours recommended by the National Sleep Foundation. 36% of teenagers reported feeling tired because of stress in the past month. Stress also affects the exercise and eating habits of students negatively, causing them to binge on eating unhealthy foods, or worse, skipping meals because of stress (“American Psychology”). According to Psychology Today, the average high school student today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s. Stress has a major impact on our later health, and school is a major component of stress in the teenage years. The school system is hurting us psychologically.

The negative effects of psychological damage can be seen later in the child’s life as the damage festers and increases, but purely physical detriments can be traced back to the school system as well. In a 2010 study from Web MD, Jennifer Warner writes “A backpack loaded with books may set your child up for spine strain rather than success.” According to Timothy B. Neuschwander, MD, of the University of California, backpack loads are in fact responsible for the majority of adolescent back pain. In the study, MRI scans were performed on the spines of eight children of the average age of 11. Each child had one scan done with an empty backpack, then one with backpack loads of 10%, 20%, and 30% of their body weight (the average backpack load or 9, 18, and 26 pounds, respectively). The results showed with the loaded backpacks the discs that act as a cushion between the bones of the spine were compressed, the back pain increased with the load size (5 out of 10 with the heaviest load), and most children had to adjust their postures in order to be able to carry the 26-pound load. Warner writes, “Researchers say the results showed that heavy backpacks cause compression of the spinal discs and increased spinal curvature that are related to the back pain reported by children.” In the study, the children wore both straps of the backpack, but researchers say the spinal curvature could be even worse if only one strap were used.

When discussing the psychological effects of the public education system, I mentioned the unhealthy homework load. This amount of work is what causes these backpack loads to be so heavy, causing even physical hurt to students.

My third confirmation point to prove my thesis is the public school system produces detrimental societal expectations, such as being coddled and sheltered from opposing views as they are or were in school. These manifest in claimed “microaggressions” and subsequent demands for “trigger warnings.” In December 2014, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law — or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause distress. In February of last year, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing new campus politics of sexual paranoia. She was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June of the same year, a professor wrote under a protective pseudonym an essay describing how gingerly he has to teach. The headline read, “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.” Many popular comedians have stopped performing on college campuses, such as Chris Rock. Others like Jerry Seinfeld have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students. Two terms have risen from this hypersensitivity: microaggressions, defined as small words or actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but are thought of as an act of violence nonetheless; and trigger warnings, meaning alerts professors are expected to issue if something (e.g., books or other course materials or subjects) might cause a strong emotional response. An example of a microaggression is to ask Asian or Latino Americans where they were born, because the question implies they are not real Americans. This question could be completely benign, but the fact such questions are often met with a drastic overreaction is what invalidates the offense. An example of a trigger warning is some students have called for warnings Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird includes a less than savory name for African Americans, and might “trigger” memories of past trauma or racism (Lukianoff and Haidt).

Recent claims of microaggressions border on the surreal. At Arizona State University, students claimed Walk-Only Zones were discriminatory toward those who could not walk. They started a Change.org petition to rename these paths to Pedestrian-Only Zones or “any other inclusive title.” A flyer advertising the petition featured silhouettes of people using crutches, wheelchairs, and canes, and urged people to “make ASU a more inclusive space for ALL students and faculty” and claimed “Not everyone at ASU can walk, so WHY use the lingo ‘Walk Only’?” They must not have realized pedestrian derives from the Latin pedestere, which means “going on foot” (Beard 4-5). At Brandeis University Asian-American students attempted to “foster a healthy dialogue about racism … and how harmful and pervasive microaggressions can be.” However, several students felt the display itself was a microaggression and the group was forced to apologize (Beard 4). This hypersensitivity in students is fostered by a basic failing of the American education system: students are being taught what to think, not how to think — that is, they are being taught their own personal opinions and categories of what is “offensive” (microaggressions) are more important than an actual learning environment.

This careful, calculated protectiveness can possibly be traced back to before the 1980s. The surge in crime from the ’60s through the early ’90s caused Baby Boomer parents to be far more protective than their own parents. As stories of abducted children flooded the news, parents tightened the reins on their children in the hopes of keeping them safe. This obsession with safety also happened at school. Dangerous play structures were removed from playgrounds; peanut butter was banned from student lunches. After the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, several schools cracked down on bullying, implementing “zero tolerance” policies. In many ways, children born after 1980 got one message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do whatever it takes to protect you … not just from strangers, but from each other as well (Lukianoff and Haidt).

Also in the 1980s and ’90s college campuses began censoring such free speech, driven by political correctness in the school system. According to Professor Donald Downs, censorship “go[es] in cycles,” and now censorship is coming back as “liberty and equality are increasingly pitched against each other. This time it’s students who, in the name of equality, are demanding a climate free from offense, waging a war against microaggressions and calling for trigger warnings” (Williams). A world free from offense will never exist while humanity does. People’s demands to censor others because they don’t agree with them is quite plainly an immature way of trying to avoid what they will have to deal with in any situation in life. In today’s postmodern society, it is claimed there is no universal truth; every man has his own truth. But that would mean there is no basis for telling people what they’re saying is wrong in the first place. A person can make a racist or arrogant statement and there is no way to judge whether that statement is right or not. And yet these attempts at censorship and trigger warnings quite clearly are acting on the basis some things are wrong for anyone to say, and this list of censored speech (or microaggressions) is being provided by nothing more than the arbitrary popular culture developed by a culture of hypersensitivity. Early in high school, students are being taught according to this warped worldview.

In some school districts, students are forbidden from using any Christian terms, criticizing Barack Obama, expressing support for the Second Amendment or socialism, or condemning radical Islamic suicide bombers. One school in California was sued by their 2014 salutatorian after he was made to rewrite his speech multiple times due to his inclusion of his Christian faith. He was even made to rewrite it because he mentioned the Bible by name and referred to Jesus Christ as “my savior.” The school said the student had no right of free speech, claiming the salutatory speech was not a private one and thus the student speaker was merely the “school district’s authorized representative.” Through this role, the student became an agent of the state government and could only say what the government deemed appropriate. And yet, due to the United State Supreme Court’s 1969 case of Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District, students do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they attend public school (Klukowski).

Students are being taught free speech is only permitted if the government says so. With the overwhelming emphasis on liberalism and racial and gender inequality, it is no wonder most claimed microaggressions are toward women or minorities. Students are being taught only certain people are allowed to be offended, but those who are allowed to be offended is entirely arbitrary. There will always be disagreement over who is wrong and who is right, whether that’s offensive or if it isn’t. It’s a chaotic system that only serves to create unrealistic expectations for later interactions in life. And students are being indoctrinated from a very young age in school.

But there is an even deeper problem with trigger warnings. According to basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided. A person who is trapped in an elevator during a power outage may panic and think she is going to die. That terrifying experience can change neural connections in her amygdala, leading to an elevator phobia. If you actually want this woman to continue to fear for her life, you should help her avoid elevators. However, if you want her to return to normalcy, the idea of elevators must be reintroduced to the woman in a positive light — through exposure therapy. Through the gradual reintroduction of elevators as not being dangerous, the woman’s amygdala will reprogram itself to associate the previously-feared situation with safety or normalcy. The same process can be used to students who call for trigger warnings in order to return to normalcy. Students with PTSD should obviously get treatment, but that does not mean they should try to avoid normal life (Lukianoff and Haidt). Students and faculty should not be limited by hypersensitivity. The school system is setting students up to believe others will change their opinions to match their own if they’re bullied and silenced. They are taught every man is an island and everyone has his own truth, and that’s okay … except when others’ truths offend them. Then those truths are wrong and theirs are right. This is an unrealistic and unhelpful expectation for society.

The first counterargument against my thesis is if education is not compulsory, children will not learn. But the fact of the matter is, learning is not mandatory in the present education structure — school is. And there are examples of how when children explore unprecedented ways of learning, they live very satisfying lives, sometimes even compared to those who went through the system. Some two million families in the United States homeschool — that is, teach their children at home instead of sending them to school — but around ten percent of that two million actually identify as “unschooled.” In a survey of 232 parents who unschooled their children by Peter Gray and his colleague Gina Riley, respondents were overwhelmingly positive about their unschooling experience. Parents said it not only improved their children’s learning, but also their psychological and social wellbeing as well as family harmony. Challenges were mostly defending their choice of learning to their friends and family, as well as overcoming their own deeply ingrained ways of thinking about education (Gray and Riley 1). According to Gray, people learn through “exploration and interaction with their environment.” In the public school system, this means interaction with teachers, same-age peers, textbooks, assignments, tests, et cetera, selected for the child as part of a pre-planned curriculum. While the school system claims to prepare students for the “real world,” unschooling actually makes the child’s classroom the real world. While culture as a whole is moving toward more narrowly defined curricula, more standardized testing, and more hours, days, and years in school, the unschooling movement is growing.

While often considered a branch of homeschooling, the fundamental difference between the two is homeschooling is literally schooling at home, while unschooling is based on learning through everyday experiences, like a baby learning to talk through being spoken to. Also, in unschooling the children choose their experiences and therefore experience things that automatically match their abilities, interests, and learning styles (Gray and Riley 2). When those taking part in the survey were asked to define their unschooling, one parent stated

For us, unschooling is self-directed, interest-driven, freedom-based learning all the time. We do not use curriculum, nor do we have certain days or hours where we schedule learning. We are learning as we live. We view learning as a natural part of humanity, and we believe that learning is naturally joyful and desirable. We value a spirit of wonder, play, and meaningful connections with others. We seek to experience “education” as a meaningful, experiential, explorative, joyful, passionate life.

The majority of families that took place in the survey identified with this definition (Gray and Riley 8). Many of the families’ reasons for unschooling were wasted time, the paltry amount of learning that occurred, and/or their child’s boredom, loss of curiosity, or declining interest in learning. These families felt their children’s love of learning and intrinsic passion was being buried under the busy work and/or homework. More said they pulled their children out of school due to their child’s unhappiness, anxiety, or condition of being bullied at school. One parent said

My older daughter was having test anxiety (it was the first year that No Child Left Behind was implemented) and wasn’t eating at lunchtime, was overcome by the noise and the smells, and was distracted in the classroom. My younger daughter was bored and beginning to refuse to participate in classroom activities…. Things finally got to the breaking point and I pulled them out without having a plan, but I knew I could definitely do better than the school. I was done sending them someplace that made them so sad and created so much tension in our family.

When asked how they transferred from traditional schooling to unschooling, many families described it as a gradual journey, using structured homeschooling or state-supplied curriculum before unschooling (Gray and Riley 10). One parent’s reason for the switch was homeschooling was “taking the problems my son had at public school and [was] just changing the location.” The same parent tried numerous forms of homeschooling, having researched unschooling but unable to trust it would work. He describes his “ah-ha moment” as when his two younger children taught themselves to read (Gray and Riley 10-11). One unschooling mother wrote her husband was teaching at a small high school, and when their oldest child reached school age

the experience of dealing with kids who did not fit the system really opened his eyes. It pained him so many students had simply given up all enthusiasm for learning at that point in their lives. The kids had either learned to jump through the hoops or had completely stopped trying, but there was very little real passion for learning left in them (Gray and Riley 13).

When asked to describe the benefits of unschooling, nearly 60% of the respondents described the greatest advantages were for their children’s learning. They saw their children learning “more efficiently and eagerly, and learning more life-relevant material.” One parent wrote, “The children can participate in the real world, learn real life skills, converse with people of all ages.” Many also said their children retained greater curiosity and interest in learning. A little over 52% described benefits such as their children being happier, less stressed, more self-confident, more agreeable, and/or more socially outgoing and prepared than they would be if they were in school or being schooled at home — unlike the antisocial stereotypes of home and unschoolers — due to the fact they were constantly interacting with people of all ages and backgrounds in a larger community instead of just their same-age peers in a classroom. 57% of the respondents also said they had an increased family closeness due to unschooling. According to Gray, parents “reported greater closeness with their children and improved sibling relationships” (Gray and Riley 16).

Nearly forty percent named a freedom of scheduling as a benefit as well. Since there was no set schedule disrupting the flow of their day, they could travel as a family and continue learning through experience (Gray and Riley 17), the very definition of learning stated in my confirmation! Unschoolers have gone on to complete bachelor’s degrees or higher, and attend and graduate a variety of colleges, from Ivy League universities to state universities and smaller liberal-arts colleges. They (the unschoolers) called the transfer into the college environment fairly easy due to their high self-motivation and capacity for self-direction. Their most frequent complaints, according to Gray, “were about the lack of motivation and intellectual curiosity among their college classmates, the constricted social life of college, and, in a few cases, constraints imposed by the curriculum or grading system,” or in other words, their counterparts limited by mandatory education (Vangelova).

In modern-day America, the word “success” has become synonymous with “schooling.” However, this is not true in either a financial or an intellectual sense. Benjamin Franklin spent only two years in the Boston Latin School before dropping out at age ten and apprenticing as a printer. Einstein dropped out of high school at age 15. John D. Rockefeller, the world’s first recorded billionaire, dropped out of high school two months before graduation to take business courses at Folsom Mercantile College. Walt Disney dropped out at 16 to join the army, but being too young to enlist, he joined the Red Cross with a forged birth certificate (Davies et al.). Tumblr founder David Karp dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and in 2013 sold his startup Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. Oscar winner Quentin Tarantino also dropped out of high school at 15, and now he has been nominated for 152 awards and has won 114. Others are Billy Joel, and James H. Clark, the self-made businessman and cofounder of Netscape considered to be the first Internet billionaire (Gillett). The most important thing is not whether you are well-known or financially successful, but whether or not you are doing what you are passionate about. In his famous 2006 Ted Talk (which remains the most-viewed Ted Talk to this day), Sir Ken Robinson, Former Professor of education at University of Warwick, said:

Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19^th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideals. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that.  Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you won’t be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way. 

He is saying the public education system is set up to try and make people “successful” in very specified areas in which they may or may not be talented. But earning more in a career in science or mathematics is not conducive to happiness. Without compulsory, standardized schooling, students would have more time, effort, and energy to pursue things they actually liked. Thus, compulsory education is not the only way for a child to learn or lead them to what makes them happy, instead it often draws them away from pursuing their passions in favor of a higher salary.

The second counterargument against my thesis is trigger warnings are helpful for people who have suffered traumatic experiences. This idea that words or sensory input can trigger painful memories of past trauma has existed since at least World War I, when psychiatrists began treating soldiers for what is now known as PTSD, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, explicit trigger warnings are believed to have originated much more recently on message boards in the early days of the Internet. Trigger warnings, or warnings of potentially sensitive material, became particularly prevalent in self-help and feminist fora, where they allowed readers who had suffered from events like sexual assault to avoid graphic content that might trigger flashbacks or panic attacks. Search-engine trends show the phrase “trigger warning” broke into mainstream use online around 2011, spiked in 2014, and reached an all-time high in 2015. The use of trigger warnings on campus seems to have followed a similar trajectory. That is, seemingly overnight, students at universities across the country have begun demanding their professors issue warnings before covering material that might elicit a negative response (Lukianoff and Haidt). This sounds beneficial, but the real application of “trigger warning demands” are substantially less altruistic.

In 2013, a task force composed of administrators, students, recent alumni, and one faculty member at Oberlin College, in Ohio, released an online resource guide for faculty (later retracted due to faculty pushback) that included a list of topics warranting trigger warnings. These topics included classism and privilege, among many others. It’s hard to imagine how novels illustrating classism and privilege could provoke or reactivate the kind of terror typically implicated in PTSD. The real problem here is trigger warnings are generally demanded for a long list of ideas and attitudes some students find politically offensive, all under the misleading guise of preventing other students from being harmed. This is an example of what psychologists call “motivated reasoning” — we spontaneously generate arguments for conclusions we want to support. Books for which students have called publicly for trigger warnings within the past couple of years include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway at Rutgers for “suicidal inclinations” and Ovid’s Metamorphoses at Columbia for sexual assault. Jeannie Suk compares teaching under demands for trigger warnings to trying to teach “a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.”

Students struggling from PTSD are not being helped by demands trigger warnings. As a whole, it would be better for them to adjust to normal life in college so they can enter society as healthy, mature adults. Thus, trigger warnings are not helpful for people who have suffered traumatic experiences.

The third counterargument against my thesis is the stress high-schoolers are made to endure will prepare them for later life. Although it is true all human beings will probably encounter stress of various forms and levels in their lives, enduring unhealthy levels of stress at the formative ages of high school can be detrimental later in life (note that “stress” is different from “microaggressions.” Trigger warnings are not demanded in order to avoid stress, but to avoid politically uncomfortable subjects). The fact of the matter is, adults ordinarily fail to recognize the incidence and magnitude of stress in the lives of children. For example, studies have shown “parents perceive children as having lower levels of stress than children perceive themselves having” (Humphrey 8). This is confirmed by a nation-wide survey that concludes “parents underestimate how much children worry” (Witkin 11).

Although stress can provide energy to handle emergencies, make changes, meet challenges, and excel, the long-term consequences of stress are damaging to one’s mental and physical health. If stress is constant and unrelieved, the body has little time to relax and recover. The body is put into overdrive, so to speak, a state scientists call “hyperarousal”; when blood pressure rises, breathing and heart rates speed up, blood vessels constrict, and muscles tense up. Stress disorders such as high blood pressure, headaches, reduced eyesight, stomachaches and other digestive problems, facial, neck, and back pain, can result. High levels of the major stress hormone, cortisol, depress the immune system. A number of studies conducted by institutions like the National Center for Biotechnology, the University of California, and the American Cancer Society found high levels of cortisol (one of three main “stress hormones,” including adrenalin) are often indicators of AIDS, MS, diabetes, cancer, coronary artery disease, and Parkinson’s disease. These problems do not go away when children mature to adults.

“Stressed children are vulnerable to these disorders as well as: sleep disturbances…skin diseases, and infections. Like adults, they become more accident prone. Research suggests that even physical conditions with a genetic basis — like asthma, allergies, and diabetes — can be adversely affected by childhood stress” (Lewis 4). Patterns learned in childhood roll over to adulthood. Dr. Reed Moskowitz, founder and medical director of Stress Disorders Clinic at New York University says “Stress disorders exist at all ages. The physiological consequences of stress build up over years and decades.” Thus, as opposed to positively preparing one for their future, stress caused by mandatory public high school is detrimental to students for the rest of their lives (Tennant).

In my thesis, I have discussed the failings of the American public school system. Changes must be made in order to better prepare students for the world they are set to inherit, or even improve that world before it becomes their responsibility. For it will be the job of the upcoming generation to deal with some of the biggest social, political, and environmental issues to date, such as the definition of gender, ISIL, privacy on the Internet, and Global Warming. The school system as it is is clearly not preparing students to deal with what they will face — it is making it worse. The only way the school system will change is through the dedication and involvement of people who care about the future of this country. So ask yourself; will I live my life in a Christian bubble I’m comfortable in, watch the world burn, and say “I told you so”? or will I shape the world my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit into a better place?

Works Cited