We’re boring our kids in school: This easy reform will actually help them learn
Excerpted from "The Game Believes in You"
In 1967, media critic Marshall McLuhan predicted that within two decades, technology would make school unrecognizable. “As it is now, the teacher has a ready-made audience,” he wrote. “He is assured of a full house and a long run. Those students who don’t like the show get flunking grades.” But if students were given the choice to get their information elsewhere, he predicted, “the quality of the experience called education will change drastically. The educator then will naturally have a high stake in generating interest and involvement for his students.”
McLuhan was right about one thing: students can now get much of their information elsewhere. Many young people “are now deeply and permanently technologically enhanced,” said business and education consultant Marc Prensky—his observation will hit home to anyone who has watched teenagers sit in a Starbucks, wait in line at a Walgreens checkout stand, or attend a family function. But in school, those who don’t like the show still get flunking grades. However, these students have a vision of something different. They now have the experience, outside of school, of diving into worlds that are richer and more relevant than anything they get in school. There’s a technical term for this phenomenon, in which someone sees the possibilities that lie just out of reach but must spend time doing lesser things. It’s called boredom, or as theologian Paul Tillich once described it, “rage spread thin.”
In spite of our teachers’ heroic efforts, our schools are fighting a losing battle with boredom. Indiana University’s High School Survey of Student Engagement finds that 65 percent of students report being bored “at least every day in class.” Sixteen percent—nearly one in six students—are bored in every class.
Perhaps school, for all its efforts, simply isn’t challenging enough. In a 2006 study of high school dropouts, eight in ten said they did less than an hour of homework per night. Two-thirds said they would have worked harder if more had been demanded of them. When American journalist Amanda Ripley in 2013 surveyed hundreds of exchange students from around the world, she found that nine out of ten international students who spent time in the United States said classes were easier here; of the American teenagers who had studied abroad, seven out of ten agreed. “School in America was many things, but it was not, generally speaking, all that challenging,” she wrote. “The evidence suggests that we’ve been systematically underestimating what our kids can handle, especially in math and science.”
