It’s no surprise that our school system is seen as an assembly line. From kindergarten, children enter one end of the machine and progress through stages of grade levels, testing, and finally diplomas. We never question how we learn. We learn through a process of receiving information and then fixing what the teacher believes to be wrong. The teacher’s input is always perfect, whereas the student’s output can contain mistakes. The idea then is to correct these errors.

Productivity in the classroom is no different than productivity within the factory. The language for a low-performing student is no different from that of a low-performing worker. The student is “underperforming” or “failing standards”. When a student is low performing, the gap between the school’s expectations and the student’s actual knowledge is perceived as a deficiency. The student is broken. As a broken child, this student now requires special attention through tutoring, aiming to meet the factory’s standards.

How They Measure Up

A child can measure their brokenness in a plethora of ways. They gauge their performance by the excitement they feel when showing their parents their grades, or by the timing of when it’s advantageous to use a red pen to try to change them. Test scores and GPAs might seem like numbers, but they actually measure the worth of a student. A low score on a test wasn’t just a low score. It judged my ability to learn and my preparation for the test as insufficient. A high score is proof that the machine is functioning, while a low score is proof of a malfunction.

High-performing children are no longer children in the human sense. They are the scores on their assessments, and the letter grades on their report cards. The sad part of it all is that these numbers don’t tell the story that we believe they tell. We assume that the numbers measure knowledge, but in reality, they only measure conformity. This is coming from someone who was a 4.0 student (which literally means nothing 20 years later).

Where the Creative Suffer

In this mechanistic school system, curiosity and creativity are not rewarded. In my experience, I wasn’t even able to solve a math problem creatively. If it didn’t fit the steps of my teacher, it was at least partially incorrect. The school system fails the artists of the world. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are often absent in school, making it surprising to think we can suddenly change this culture as adults.

The artist is told that they are doing something wrong. They are continuously conditioned until, perhaps, college, which makes it about 13 years of conformity. That’s a lot to unlearn for the artist. That’s a lot of shame that needs to be processed because they were told that difference doesn’t matter in this one-size-fits-all system. A child who excels at music but struggles in chemistry is told that they are behind. A child who thinks differently from what is being prescribed to them is told that they are wrong.

The Promise of Education

We go through the education system because there’s a promise of progress. We are taught that learning is a linear process, and to succeed in life, we must climb this ladder until we graduate. The irony is that graduation never comes. Sure, you get a piece of paper, but the diploma guarantees nothing. It took about 4 years after I graduated to get my first full-time job. I got my MBA, and yet, I still feel like I’m not in the place I want to be.

I bought books, thinking there was still more to learn. Even when I wasn’t in a classroom, I still felt broken. Knowledge was the only way to fix it. More papers were needed. I can earn certifications in almost anything within 12 weeks. Yet, none of these guaranteed the things that I wanted. It only led to a perpetual cycle where ignorance was seen as a deficiency, and education was my ticket out… until I felt the need to learn something else. My education wasn’t driven by curiosity, but by the need to fill my ignorance, hoping it would lead to success.

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