The Shadow Curriculum of American Schools
What lessons do kids learn from the structure of school?
We tend to make the mistake of thinking that school is primarily for teaching kids information.
Of course, we want students to learn the causes of the Civil War, how to solve quadratic equations, or how to conjugate French verbs. All of this stuff is important, and I believe in the importance of teaching a lot of content in schools, even if students won’t remember most of it. How much of the content that you learned in high school do you remember? (I’ll be honest with you here — I got As in high school math, but I don’t even know what trigonometry is)
Hopefully, students will leave school with an understanding of the subject matter they’ve studied. But it’s likely that they’ll learn more enduring lessons from the way that school is structured.
I was struck by this when reading Matt T.’s thoughtful essay on the perennial problem of “senioritis.” Matt argues that “senioritis is a policy choice,” and that we shouldn’t be surprised that high school seniors check out for their final semester of high school:
Students go through the American education system for 12 years driven by rewards and punishments: grades, detentions, graduation, college acceptances. Then, in the second semester…
