School Actively Creates Unhappiness

A wealth of current research into happiness has yielded a consistent and surprisingly small set of factors.  Three, in fact, beyond the needs of food and shelter: Relationships, Freedom, and Meaningful Work.  Strong, positive relationships create a sense of belonging, a feeling of value and importance in the world. We are social creatures, dependent upon the company of others for survival. At the same time, we are autonomous, and need independence. We don’t wish to be forced into all decisions and crave, both for ourselves and those closest, the freedom to choose.  And finally, research shows that people are most happy when they are good at the things they spend most of their time doing.  Mastery and Meaning go hand in hand.  People who are good at what they do tend to find meaning in it, and people who find meaning in what they do tend to develop the skills that create mastery.

But these are ADULT conditions.  We apply them to the workforce, the family unit, the social contract.  We do not apply these concepts to school and children.  If anything, much of what we do in school is the opposite of belonging, autonomy, and mastery.  It’s almost as if school is not merely unconcerned with the happiness of students, school is designed to eliminate their happiness altogether.

Consider Relationships.  The classroom structure is actually primarily designed to break students’ most meaningful social connections.  We sit them in desks facing one direction.  We often (and necessarily) assign seating away from the distraction of friends.  We take away their phones, of course, and attempt to limit in all sorts of often futile ways the social access of their computers.  Many schools and teachers even go to great lengths to discourage the only human relationship left, that with the teacher.

Autonomy, of course, is completely absent in school.  Kids can’t even go to the bathroom without asking permission.  They can’t choose what to wear, when to eat, what to study or when to study it.  Where to go, when to go there.  Who to be with or what to do with them.  How to walk or how to talk.  What to care about and what to ignore. The lack of freedom students have is so thorough, actually, that I suspect we simply avoid thinking about it altogether. Whatever shades one might attempt to paint the picture of school and autonomy, there’s little arguing that nearly every detail concerns the reduction of it.

The three components of happiness are somewhat exclusive of each other, even oppositional.  Relationships decrease autonomy, for example.  Strong, meaningful social commitments, as any married person or parent can tell you, come with expectations of behavior, limits on one’s personal desires and actions. Both Belonging and Autonomy can limit the acquisition of skill, especially if those skills are necessary but not chosen.  Again, as any married person can tell you, having a spouse or child in the room can seriously disrupt work.  There’s a balance that needs to be maintained, and sometimes a choice to be made.  School, obviously, is about Mastery and work.

But while meaningful work is the primary focus of school, it’s actually here where we stumble most profoundly.  Yes, education is almost exclusively dedicated to the acquisition – and mastery – of skills.  It is for this reason that we work so hard to break kids from their social circle and force them into behavior they wouldn’t otherwise choose. But since we aren’t really concerned with a student’s happiness (if we were, we wouldn’t be so aggressive in eliminating 2 of the 3 essentials), we ignore both Meaning and Mastery when instructing.

Meaning is significantly powered by choice, by Autonomy, so there is an immediate reduction of the individual aspect of meaningful work when students cannot choose what to study, when to study it, or how to study it.  But the lack of Meaning in the work of school extends much further than choice.  Often, it’s simply not considered at all.  The acquisition of skills is complicated, uncertain, and expensive if one is forced to answer the fundamental question: why?  The vague answers students so often get – almost all of them variations of ‘You’ll need this later’ – rarely address the actual question that most adults ask and answer satisfactorily about their jobs: Why?  What is the value or purpose?  Because most of the time, for that student in that place at that time, there is no answer.  They are studying the subject more or less ‘Because.’  Because that’s what the curriculum mandates.  Because that’s what’s on the test.  Because that’s what the Standard is.  Because that’s what the system says they must learn.  Because that’s what the structure of their schedule demands.  Because this is the hour in which they study that thing.  There is no ‘Meaning’ or ‘Purpose’ to the subject; there is only system and structure and process.  There is not even the reward of money, merely grades.

Sometimes there’s a kind of peripheral motivation to schoolwork that leans towards meaning – working on ‘this’ builds a parallel skill which will help later in the mastery of meaningful work on some undefined ‘that’. ‘This’ math problem helps build math fluency, which will be useful when one is an engineer or building a business.  Writing ‘this’ essay builds writing skill, which will prove necessary when one actually has worthy ideas.  But such motivations have absolutely nothing to do with meaning, and everything to do with a skill divorced from any kind of purpose; students are told simply to trust and mindlessly do.  Yet meaningful work is anything but mindless.

We might like to think, perhaps, that if ‘Meaning’ isn’t clear to their work, at least students are focused on Mastery.  But again, no.  School is not structured for Mastery.  School is structured for Adequate.

The basic motivational aspect of grades guarantees that schools are not interested in mastery.  Consider:  what is the first thing one thinks if they hear everyone in a class got A’s?  Amazing teacher and totally invested kids?  Of course not.  The class was too easy.  Most schools, in fact, attempt to maintain average grades that hover around the ‘Adequate’.  Mastery is for the few, not the many.  And while there is a great deal of teeth gnashing and lamentation about grade inflation, nobody ever makes similar points about grades being inaccurately low.  If ALL – or even most – students are achieving some form of mastery over the material, the cry goes out to make it harder.

Standardized testing has little to do with Mastery or Meaning, of course, unless it means one masters a meaningful exam, but this is just one element of the problem of assessment.  The traditional classroom measurement device – the test – is specifically designed to separate the few who have mastered the material from the many who have merely acquired the basics.  And rarely does any kind of exam really address the fundamental aspect of Meaning.  Many tests only matter in the moment, to the material of the moment.

None of the three components of happiness stand alone to the creation of a satisfying life.  By themselves, Community, Independence, and Meaningful Work do not create happiness.  If anything, too much of one and not enough of the others is often the root of an unhappy life. Conversely, none of these happiness factors is mutually exclusive and they often feed each other.  Community creates a sense of purpose and belonging, gives value and meaning to one’s work.  Mastery feeds one’s Autonomy.  Choice makes Meaning meaningful.  But in deliberately removing these components from student’s lives, we do not make learning any easier or powerful.

Kids who come to class and act social, who push against the lack of autonomy in various childish ways, or who don’t care for the work are usually punished.  We treat their actions punitively, as if they have been bad.  Yet the truth is, all they are trying to do is be happy. That’s not exactly a crime; in fact, isn’t happiness kind of the whole point of education in the first place?

Standardized Reading Tests Really Are Boring, and that’s a problem

(This is a much-needed and fairly thorough edit of an earlier post…just in case it seems vaguely familiar to the few of you who muddled through the original.)

“It’s soo booooring!”

The single specific complaint I hear from every student who struggles with the reading portions of standardized tests – including the SAT, the ACT and the FCAT in Florida – is that the reading selections are ‘boring.’  The readings don’t hold their interest.  They don’t relate.  The passages are dry and emotionless.  On the surface, this is a lousy complaint.  Boring is a relative term, relative only to the one bored.  Nothing is either inherently boring or interesting, and obviously a student who anticipates all experience to be entertaining or otherwise interesting is in for a difficult future.  Still, the universality of the response begs investigation.

It may be that the term ‘boring’ is simply the only word to come easily to the minds of  sixteen year olds.  We often latch on to the easiest answer when faced with obstacles and complications.  There are lots of reasons to dislike tests, many of them complex and multifaceted, but students have little experience beyond school, and to them the tests are simply parts of their lives they must accept.  They lack both the depth of experience to understand how Standardized exams affect their personal lives and the professional experience to understand how the tests are supposed to exist in the larger world.  Sitting in the middle of that experience, uncertain of its purpose, slaved to readings and questions over which they have no control, eager to escape but not exactly suffering in any tangible way, the only answer to their discomfort and confusion is ‘boring’.

But there is also a more profound reason students lack the vocabulary to explain their struggles with Standardized Exams.  The tests ARE boring, and it has nothing to do with the students themselves.  It’s in the nature of the tests to be boring.  Not because they are uninteresting, or dry, or tasteless and bland.  Not because they lack energy or vitality.  Not because they are repetitive, or simplistic, or opaque.  Though they are all those things.  It’s in the nature of Standardized Reading tests to be boring because they deny the reason any reading is engaging in the first place.  Standardized tests break the contextual energy that makes reading interesting.   

‘Boring’ isn’t a simple matter of missing interest – the causes of the disconnect are varied and significant.  It’s difficult to answer a question, to ‘connect’ to it, if one doesn’t know the point of the question.  It’s difficult to connect to an experience if the conditions are unjust or unfair.  And it’s quite difficult for many young adults to perform well at a process which has no clear purpose or inherent value to them.

Reading Is contextual, tests are not

Reading (like most things) is a contextual experience.  The written word does not exist alone, it acts as a bridge between two things in the real world, between the reader and whatever the writing is about.  An automobile mechanic uses the words in his manual to connect his actions to the actions of the engine.  A surfer reads a surfing magazine to connect his interest in surfing to the wide range of complex details inherent to the sport.  Novels provide a link between the reader and the meaning of experience.  When the reader engages in the text, they do so in an environment in which the written words are merely a part.

But the reading portion of a standardized exam provides few, if any, such links.  More to the point, the reading portion of the exam isn’t about the context, it’s about the words and sentences and paragraphs themselves, independent of any larger purpose the words serve.  Students are to prove they understand what the writing is about without any clear connection between the words and the subject of the writing as it exists in the world.  Most often, in fact, paragraphs are lifted from the middle of essays, textbooks, or novels and then students are asked questions related only to that specific passage.  The disconnect here for poor or reluctant readers can be profound.  Intuitively, students understand the purpose of the written word as a bridge, yet the test itself seems to completely ignore writing’s purpose.  Rather than a test of skills, the exam seems to many some sort of trick designed to…well, they aren’t quite sure.  What they do know, though, is that the passages seem to lack whatever vitality it is that makes things ‘interesting’ instead of ‘boring’.

The tests also are boring because they demand students read in a way that is unnatural to reading.  Students will never elsewhere be asked to read in the manner required by the exam, because, quite simply, it’s not the way (or ‘why’) we read in the first place.  Nobody ever reads a passage in order to answer specific questions about it.  There’s always a context, and for most readers the context is fundamental to the understanding.  If, for example, I am reading a novel and I find myself in a descriptive passage about the weather, I instinctively know that the author is likely setting a mood or tone and that the passage is setting the place of the events.  Well designed questions will focus on this kind of reading, but such a focus is irrelevant to a student who doesn’t read many novels, much less one who is either confused by the purpose of the exam in general or – as is so often the case given the sheer pressure the tests create – suffers from test anxiety.  

The actual assessment aspect of a Standardized exam is also different from that which students usually experience in the classroom.  In the classroom, tests related to readings involve specific lessons and details from the recent past, which are reviewed and then built upon (or discarded) for the next lesson.  They are part of an ongoing experience, with all sorts of visible and invisible purposes.  Vocabulary tests, for example, usually concern words studied or reviewed previously in class.  These are lists of specific words defined and spelled.  Students know that learning the words is part of a wider process and purpose, the amassing of vocabulary, the recognition of roots, prefixes, suffixes, and cognates, deeper understanding of a text through its vocabulary, etc.  (To be sure, the absence of clear purpose within a classroom is also one significant reason students struggle.)  None of that larger purpose or extended history is evident on a Standardized exam.  Vocabulary skills on a Standardized test are mostly about gleaning definition from context clues.  While this is no insignificant skill, the full depth of it is lost if the passage has no larger context.  Again, students are asked to prove they can glean the meaning of a word or passage from the very small fragment they have before them, a passage often sliced from the body of a much larger creature.   

Avid reader, poor test taker

Many students who are enthusiastic readers perform poorly on reading exams.  It’s frustrating, particularly since the issue is not skill.  Because the point of a reading exam is so different from the reading they do elsewhere, that student actually ‘reads’ differently.  When we read, we don’t hold all the information the words contain in equal measure.  Without much conscious decision, we evaluate the purpose of the text and group the information accordingly, holding usually only a few common threads and crucial supporting evidence throughout the reading experience. (This is how one can read a 1,000 page novel and not get lost.)  Since a reading exam, however, is testing comprehension removed from context, students don’t know where to start.  As a result, a weak test taker tries to hold every single word of a reading in their minds, to in effect memorize the passage before they get to the questions.  A paragraph into any reading passage and they have lost all track of the beginning.  By the end of the passage, they have to go back and start all over again.

Later, they wonder, ‘What happened?’  The standard answer: ‘It was a boring selection.’  But behind that answer is real damage, for these enthusiastic, avid readers exit the experience being told that they are poor readers.  Many of them lose the passion.  

Moving Forward

There are answers to this nightmare, answers actually discovered by many people some time after they leave school, all those folks who go on to great success despite lackluster academic performance.  Yet presently, the school system relies primarily on testing to mark, monitor, measure, and motivate.  A student might understandably survive their academic years under the impression that the world of successful professional adults operates under the same general guidelines.  To many, the thought of this is enough to steer them towards less professional fields.  The world outside school, however, accommodates everyone to varying degrees, and it does not rely on testing – it relies on individual product.  Like reading itself, the world students graduate into is purpose driven.

Standardized tests do work, of course.  They do measure many student’s reading ability, but in many ways what they actually measure is kind of peripheral to the skill of reading comprehension.  Good students are very often simply more curious than poor students.  Good students are open to ideas, and are willing to gaze past the limitations of a passage to the material within.  Good students also read a lot, and over a wide range of topics; thus, they are more likely familiar with the variety of passages and language that shows up on the test.  Often their ability is not so much their skill as it is their experience.  But it is by no means a democratic or equal measure, and all too many students are not being accurately judged.  The big question, then, is this:  How can an assessment accurately gauge or evaluate the skill of a process that isn’t actually being fully tested?  Is it even an accurate assessment of a student’s true reading skills if the test doesn’t allow the student to demonstrate the skill?

We’ve been evaluating student ability this way for a long time now, but the past does not quite serve as a standard for the present when it comes to standardized exams.  The two big hitters – the SAT and the ACT for college – are relatively new to the scene, and for a long time they were hand-graded essay style tests.  Only recently have the public schools themselves gone full-on with standardized exams.  In other words, these tests are not classics.  Moreover, the model for the standardized exam is drawn from tests that measure advanced academic potential; that is, success in school.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach, so long as it applies to those young adults with an interest in pursuing academic fields.  Those are the ones who do well on exams.  Currently, however, we apply the model to all students, regardless of their interests or abilities, and bemoan the lack of universal success.  The tests are also a product of their time and circumstance.  Until recently, these kinds of exams were the easiest, most efficient, and accurate way to measure large groups of essentially anonymous applicants.  That is not true anymore.  If we so desired, and were willing to undertake the (admittedly strenuous) task of changing direction, we could create an evaluation system that would more accurately gauge ability, not to mention serve – far more accurately – a much wider range of demands.

It may be that the standardized exam is here to stay.  Accountability in an institution as entrenched, bureaucratic, and large as the education system is difficult, to say the least, and consistent, across the board, exams are quite possibly the only reasonable path.  But let’s at least be honest about both what should be measured – not student academic success on a large scale, but possible student strengths and ability on the scale of the individual – and how best to democratically measure those skills.  At the least, we should give the students power over their own destiny.  Let them choose what tests to take.  Give them some choice in the reading.  Let them sense that the exam is merely a tool for direction and proof of achievement.

If we are to use an exam to measure our kids, we should provide as many exams as possible, and allow the scores on those tests to be the badge by which the students earn entry into the work they choose.  We don’t need two exams – English and math – or three – writing – or four – add science.  We should have hundreds, for everything they choose.  And we should not measure them by our choices (which I doubt we even understand), but by the paths they choose.  Our students should not be forced to come to us with a piece of paper that judges them by our standards.  They should come to us with a piece of paper that says, “This is what I care about and what I’m good at.”