Students on School Reform
School’s a good thing for all of us—kids and adults—to complain and argue about, to have ideas about. This is a big part of why school is simply, if not solely, a good thing.
Since this unusual school year started a couple of weeks ago, my two kids – a freshman and a junior at a large Portland Public high school – have been staggering out of bed in the morning, riding TriMet buses in oversized jeans, and hastily dropping their loaded backpacks upon return in the afternoon. They’ve also been liberally sharing their ideas about how the experience of high school might be improved. I imagine they’re not alone in having and sharing these ideas. My kids are not policy wonks or aspiring educational reformers. They’re kids, and they have to go to school, and they, like all kids, have ideas about their lives.
Here is what they think ought to be done with high school:
Start later. Instead of 8:30, maybe 9:30, or 10:30, or 11:00. My son refers obliquely to what “the research shows” about sleep and schedules and stages of life.
Make more time for lunch. My daughter says she’s barely started eating before she has to get to her next class.
Stop trying to pack in information that they’ll never need in life. “When will I need to know how 2x * 3y = 15 – 3 or whatever?”
Classes should spend more time outside. Not necessarily on instruction – it could just be time to do classwork – but do it outside.
No homework.
Stagger “passing period” so the halls are less jammed as students go from class to class.
Lighter backpacks.
Keep going with fewer classes a day for longer periods (as they started doing in response to COVID).
Keep lots of kids, but add more teachers.
Make it less like a giant machine and more tailored to how each individual can learn.
Get students more focused on social issues right from the start so they can learn about alternatives to current social norms (his word, not mine). This would also be the best way to learn critical thinking skills (his addition, not mine).
Add a lot more social time.
Some of these ideas contradict each other. Some have been aired right here in the Oregon Way (see Steve Novick on sleep and school start times). Some are exceedingly familiar (from my own long-ago high school experience, from Pink Floyd, from Rousseau and Dewey and all sorts of pedigreed and unpedigreed education critics). Some clearly depend on how the details would be worked out. But they’re all reasonable suggestions, rooted in experience and observation and also in hope about what school might and might not be.
As I’ve listened to my son and daughter weigh in on how school might be different, I’ve been thinking about what school does for us as a culture. School, especially large public school, is the closest thing we have to a broad and deep shared experience. School is likely to be the place where we mix most with people from different backgrounds and beliefs, including older people who tell us what we need to do and model who we might become. School is where we learn how to explain why we think what we think, in writing and in speech. School is the place that evaluates us most explicitly, that tells us what we’re good at and not so good at and may even suggest what we will go on to do when school is done. School is where we make friends and shed ourselves of previous friends. It’s where we start going out with people and breaking up and getting a taste of being broken up with.
School is culture. It brings us together and divides us up, provides a shared experience and helps us sort ourselves out. It takes up a lot of our days, our time, and our youth. It is required. And it is, again, for many people, in person. Masked, but in person.
Neither of my kids have said much about masks. They’ve talked about teachers, students, assignments, food, hallways, and much more. But masks, which seem so central to so much “adult” conversation, don’t even warrant a mention. My kids seem to have accepted masks as part of being with others, and they’re glad to be with others. It’s the being with others that they most want to pay attention to. The meal time, the break time, the social time. Even the classes.
Their thoughts about school, about this core piece of their acculturation, have nothing to do with the culture wars. Their thoughts about school are chiefly about how school does and doesn’t make it possible for them to live with others and grow as people in the ways that they think are best. I don’t agree with everything they say about how school should be, but it’s hard not to like what they’re saying.
School’s a good thing for all of us—kids and adults—to complain and argue about, to have ideas about. This is a big part of why school, almost no matter when it starts and what it teaches, is simply, if not solely, a good thing.
Adam Davis works with Oregon Humanities to get people thinking and talking together, and he used to lead backcountry trail crews with the US Forest Service.
Love the feedback from the Davis kids. Except for spending a lot of "in-person" time with classmates at school, they can get most of the things on their checklist from a full-time online school like Connections Academy. Sleeping in, longer lunch, class outside, no homework, no packed hallways, and backpacks only for extracurricular activities like sports.
Students also decide how long they want to spend on an assignment each day, live webinars with teachers are usually not more than an hour, and each student's learning is personalized to their needs. Connection’s students often socialize before live classes, chat over social media and text like a lot of teens, but have plenty of friends IRL-in real life.