What schools actually teach kids

What do schools teach kids? A typical answer would be; science, math, languages, history, etc… I don’t quite agree. With my limited experience of schooling, here’s what I think schools teach kids:

      1.      How to be mean to themselves

When a child enters the school building for the first time, he has a strong sense of self worth – he respects himself and demands to be respected by others as well. But by the time he reaches primary school, he no longer has any self-respect left in him.  He listens to people humiliating him, reprimanding him, blaming him for things he never did, scolding him for being too intelligent, that he stops standing up for himself. In fact, now he’s part of the gang who is insulting him and telling him he’s worthless. He curses himself all the time; for speaking up in class, for being too cheeky, for being himself.  

       2.      How to be mean to others

In schools, people are so often mean to kids - and kids to themselves - that they come to think, “Oh, it’s okay to be mean to people”.  It is an everyday sight in a school classroom to see kids making fun of other kids, laughing at their mistakes, or even bullying them. For them, it’s normal.  Often you will see older kids picking at younger ones, calling them kindergarten babies, or physically stronger kids bullying weaker ones.  It’s because they have seen older people bugging younger people so often that they’re no longer sensitive to it. As the famous sentence goes; ‘Hurt people hurt people’.

       3.      How to be ‘like everybody else’

Schools want all children to be exactly alike – they make all of them wear uniforms, make all of them write in cursive, make sure all of them are on the same level (nobody should be lagging behind or standing out from the rest).

In school children – those who have been in the system long enough to be tamed – I see this raging desire to be exactly like the rest. You’ll observe that if one child paints a flower in art class, in seconds, the entire class will be painting flowers. If one child says his mom is his favourite person, the next child will also want to say that his mom is also his favorite person (even if she isn’t really). I think it’s the school’s expectation from the kids to be uniform which makes them act so much alike.

As they grow up into teenagers, this desire of wanting to be ‘like everybody else’ usually transforms into wanting to dress like, or have the same thing as the rest of their class.

       4.      How to hate their mother tongue*

In schools where, children are made to speak in a foreign language (English, in Karachi), they are usually given the message that speaking your mother tongue is disgraceful and should be avoided. Kids who speak in Urdu are scolded by the teacher and are considered dishonourable by the rest of the class.

In some cases, students are not even allowed to talk in Urdu to each other or during recess. Implicitly, schools teach kids to look down upon their language. Often people who are sent to English-medium schools grow up as adults who frown at anyone who speaks to them in Urdu and consider speaking in their own language disgraceful.

*in the typical Pakistani context

       5.      How to do what the teacher says, and nothing else

Children are born as independent learners with a natural instinct to explore, discover, and invent, and are immensely curious about everything around them. However, schools; in the process of ‘education’ rob them off their ability to learn by themselves. They are tamed – like lions in a circus – until they do only what the ringmaster (or the teacher, in the classroom scenario) tells them to.

I remember one incident when I was astonished by how school kids don’t do anything unless instructed by a teacher.  It was during a workshop my sister was conducting for kids – when it was time for break she told them they could go outside and have something to eat. No one moved from their seats. She repeated what she had said, no one moved again. Then my dad came up, told them to close their notebooks, stand up, make a line, and go outside for their break. The kids then went outside, having received proper instructions to do so. I was astounded!

Although people may not agree, I think this is what kids learn from schools – although schools may have been trying to teach something entirely different to them!