The Hostage Situation in American Schools

Are we holding our students hostage by withholding creativity from our students in school?

We’ve heard of Google’s 20 percent time. It’s the idea that employees spend 20 percent of their time at work, working on innovative projects of their own choice that they think will most benefit Google.

When it comes to school, students, especially older students, desperately want and need some autonomy over their education experience and their definition of what a good education is. The adults running the education system in this country have decided to mandate from the top down and deny students this opportunity. High stakes testing. Sports budgets cut. Arts budgets cut.

Additionally, students are compelled to attend school through age 16. So we have a situation where students are forced to be at school, but they have little say in their education experience. Add to that the regular threat of gun violence in our schools, and it sounds suspiciously like a hostage situation.

We know that the American school system is a product of our post-war production system when we needed factory workers who would do what they were told and play the part of cog in someone else’s machine.

Seth Godin explains it well in a recent interview, with Impact Theory, “Public school was invented by factory owners who didn’t have enough compliant factory workers. And it worked great. For a hundred years we had this wonderful system. Do what you’re told. Go to the placement office. You’ll get a job for fifty years. You won’t really like the job, but you’ll be able to go home and watch TV. Buy enough stuff that you’ll need a storage unit. And then you’ll die.”

Although the outcomes have shifted, we still live in a culture that pushes productivity. Within a system like that, creativity is, at best, overshadowed, and at worst, lost entirely.

If you’re a teacher or parent of a teenager, you know how much many of those students just do not want to be there. Why? Are teens just bucking the system because it’s their adolescent nature? Or is deeper than that?

I think it runs much deeper than that. I think the adults in this country are operating from a basis of pure fear. I think this is true in general. We’ve got a real culture of fear going on here in America. We fear injury, death, failure, litigation, anything less than perfect.

So what does fear have to do with creativity and hostages? In the education realm, our students become hostages to these adult fears that have oozed in.

We don’t want them hurt. We don’t want to be sued. We don’t want students to fail. It would reflect badly on us. So we lock them up. Keep them on a tight schedule. Keep their options limited in how they spend their free time at school. Keep them on campus. Monitor their every move during the day. In my experience subbing, this is especially evident in lower-income, racially diverse schools.

Frankly, it must be exhausting.

Fear of being unable to measure and count growth quantitatively.

Fear of angering taxpayers.

Fear of change.

And it all boils down to a fear of creativity. If our students have free time to create, they might get hurt. They might fail and it would be a waste of time. They might not create something we can measure. And then what?

Um. I think the better question would be So what? The adults are still going to be there. It’s not like we’re sending students to school just to hang out without supervision. It’s not like we’re going to open the whole school day up to an artistic free-for-all.

But can we please release the students? Can we treat them like the young adults they are? Can we please give them some autonomy so they will learn to be open to learning and trying and failing? So they will learn to take some interest and responsibility in their own education?

Geez, no wonder nobody wants to be at school. Classes are disconnected. Content is mostly irrelevant to life in the 21st century. The students know it and they fight it. Teachers have a management crisis in every class every day. We’ve killed creativity from the kindergarten years and instilled fear and anxiety in our students instead.

What competition are we trying to win? I bet we’d win harder if we fostered a love for learning, regardless of whether or not it’s quantifiable. I bet we’d win harder if we fostered kindness in our kids.

Now, not only have we allowed our adult fears to affect how our students spend their school day, but our general anxiety has permeated the general well-being of students, even outside of school. We’ve filled up their free time with structured activities, so they don’t have time to explore and create.

We’ve so limited how our students can express themselves and create, that they have learned to rely on social media to keep them entertained throughout a boring, irrelevant school day. And we all know how social media works out for teenagers.

It’s all tied together. Creativity, anxiety, fear of everything, social media and iPhone addiction, an incompetent workforce, poor contributors. We’ve got it all backwards, folks. Let the students go. Let them create.

You can watch the whole Seth Godin interview with Impact Theory, here.