School Trains Kids to be Unsuccessful

Qualities necessary for your child's success and happiness like discipline, perseverance, risk-taking, curiosity, and integrity are undermined by public school.

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American government schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something American public schools no longer provide, if they every did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in government-run schools in California.

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A month ago, I withdrew both of my children from their respected local public schools, an elementary school ranked 10 out of 10, and a middle school ranked 9 out of 10.

Why? I could see it doing to my own children what I witnessed it do to the roughly 4000 students I taught over 20 years in California public schools: systematically undermining qualities required for human greatness.

This is by no means an exhaustive list — you can probably name more if you’re paying attention — but these five are the qualities I hope to inculcate in my own children above all else.

Yes, there are LGBTQIA+ and anti-racist activist adults on campus who use classrooms and the auditorium as a bully pulpit. Campus is dominated by self-serving administrators and teachers. Statistically, my own children would probably have been bullied at some point. But all of those dangers are minor in comparison to the most pervasive damage: the undermining of discipline, perseverance, curiosity, risk-taking, and integrity.

Discipline

Two of my students last year were elite athletes, already scouted by colleges in their mid-teens. They are some of the most disciplined people I’ve ever met outside of school hours. But in the classroom?

Disaster.

The baseball player didn’t appear to care about keeping anything straight. He rarely turned in work, never studied for a test more than fifteen minutes before it took place, and played on his phone while the rest of the class took notes.

The swimmer did everything, but at the last possible second with the least possible effort. I overheard him tell a friend that he had turned a blank word document in as his final paper in another class, betting the teacher wouldn’t catch it, simply because he planned to write it the day before it was due but had a meet that weekend and never got around to it. (Spoiler: He got an A on the blank document. Yes, really.)

You’d think a system run by bells, enforced through detentions, reliant on due dates, one that labels children with a letter indicating their quality — like beef — would instill discipline.

It doesn’t.

Humans can’t develop discipline without agency, but the school system eradicates choice. The most input students have in their schooling is in choosing elective courses, but even those options are limited by the University of California’s A-G requirements for freshman admission. Most public schools in my area only offer electives aligned with UC standards.

Kids have no power over their schedule, can’t choose their teachers, and don’t have any input into the focus of their courses. In fact, they rarely have much choice beyond which Powerpoint theme to use on a project where both the topic and the group were assigned by the teacher.

So what are they left with?

Binaries.

Do I get to class on time, or stay here chatting with my friends until the 1-minute warning bell rings?

Do I take my airpods out and listen or leave one in so I appear to be paying attention?

Do I work when the teacher gives me time or do I play on my phone knowing I’ll probably be able to get it all done tomorrow in an earlier class?

School might once have trained a little discipline in kids, but that’s gone because there are no consequences for a lack of discipline.

This year, many of my students earned dozens of detentions for tardiness and truancy. A handful of them racked up hundreds.

It stands to reason that school leadership would track these kids down and at least have a chat with them. We have Student Information Systems that allow administrators to run reports to gauge exactly this kind of behavior so at-risk kids don’t fall through the cracks.

However, instead of probing one-on-one conversations with struggling students, the detentions were wiped out en masse by administrators who didn’t want the kids to feel overwhelmed by the consequences of their choices.

Other kids were allowed to erase afterschool detentions with community service; the proof of this service was a signature, easily forged . The kids have known for a long time no one is checking, and we know they know, but it’s better for administration if these things disappear.

Still others won — I am not joking — lotteries with their MTSS positive reinforcement cards (Alfie Kohn would SPIT) and had all their detentions erased.

I wasn’t surprised when students reported this, or when I saw it on the televised school announcements because the principal had pre-emptively made the decision decision to wipe out all disciplinary consequences from the previous school year.

Stroll into class ten minutes late? Ditch every third day? There’s a good chance a young man will experience none of the consequences of his failure to get his butt in the classroom.

Message received, loud and clear: timely, consistent attendance to class is only as important as a student wants it to be.

Of course, admin took cover as they always do: behind teachers. They told teachers to incentivize timeliness by making the first moments of class unmissable.

Pray tell how I am supposed to do that when you have simultaneously pushed what we are Newspeakingly calling “equitable grading practices” on all staff, which enshrine the rule that behavior may never be a component of a student’s grade.

The new orthodoxy in K-12 education is that poor performance is due to some extenuating factor, not the level of discipline or curiosity a student brings to the classroom. She might be part of a historically marginalized minority sabotaged by ubiquitous white supremacy. She might be stressed about her gender identity. There could be bullying. Her hopelessly backward troglodyte parents could be sending messages about the importance of hard work, honesty, and discipline and limiting her screen time — which is a real bummer, i.e., traumatic.

Who knows?

What we do know is this: we have full control of final grades.

The school and the District look best — and receive the fewest parent complaints — when every kid gets an A or a B. Cs are okay, but only for the poor kids whose parents aren’t part of the work-from-home laptop class that can show up during school hours to harangue the principal. As long as everyone is on track to graduate in four years, everything looks fine.

District leaders encourage teachers to adopt equitable grading policies to correct for historical inequities.

The motivation behind equitable grading is laudable. It exists to smooth out performance gaps between historically poorly-performing groups and their higher-performing peers. The practice is supposed to ensure that a student is graded on the quality rather than the quantity of his work. We shouldn’t punish kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds who lack the resources to complete hours of academic work on their own at home. Instead, we should focus on their ability to meet specific learning goals, whether they provide evidence of said achievement once or a hundred times. Once, in effect, becomes enough.

Sounds great.

Unfortunately, there’s often a chasm between educational theory and classroom practice. Things that fit on slide deck bulleted lists are what get pushed. So here’s what’s been recommended to us (in bullets, for emphasis):

• Late, incomplete, and illegible work should be accepted as-is for full credit.

• Test retakes should always be available. Usually, this is the same test given numerous times.

• If a student shows any facility with skills taught in the class at any time, including the 11th hour, that should be taken as evidence of learning and graded as passing, so given a D or better.

That last one is a doozy. In a typical classroom under equitable grading, it’s up to the teacher to decide which skills are crucial and which carry less weight. So in practice, you could be looking at three or four pieces of work the day before the end of the semester that only demonstrate a few skills. It would be up to the teacher to decide whether or not a student had done enough to pass the class, but I know which way most counselors and administrators would vote.

Well, by that logic, why not just give the kids a test at the beginning of the year, and if they show ANY facility whatsoever with the skills covered in the class, let them blow off the rest of the year? If fairness is what we’re after, and if some kids are more privileged than others, then just treat academic skills as binary in nature and, once you’ve seen ANY evidence of them, to-may-toe, to-mah-to, po-tay-to, po-tah-to, just call the whole thing off, as Armstrong and Fitzgerald advised.

What are the results of these policy changes?

Well, the desired result is achieved: way more kids pass classes.

Diplomas awarded = Equity achieved!

Unfortunately, the unintended consequences are that kids learn procrastination is fine, attendance doesn’t matter, and they can play on their phones all period all year and then turn in some work at the 11th hour.

This is exactly what successful professionals do. So we’re good, right?

Perseverance

When things get tough, what do you want your children to do?

Most birthing persons would answer that they want their kid to put their head down. breathe deep, and push through (see what I did there?), unless a task is so far outside the child’s ability they need additional instruction first.

But that’s not what public schools are teaching them.

We’re teaching them that work is optional, and if all work is optional, they’ll avoid hard work, the kind of work that engenders rapid, enormous growth, like the plague.

Kids approach school like a game of hopscotch. There are rules and a progression, but it’s basically jumping through hoops. One may stumble on occasion, but as any kid knows, it doesn’t really matter. The rules are clear. The goal is simply to get to the end of the game.

But you’re thinking, “School isn’t like that, DT. It gets progressively harder.”

Does it though? Does it when teachers are encouraged to bend every academic standard in the name of equity?

If you learn early that you can walk through the game, all the way to the 9th and final box and just step over the final line, isn’t that the best strategy? It frees up all your time, both inside and out of school, and you’ll still get decent grades.

And teachers, oh teachers. I know it’s easier to go along to get along. You’ve already seen more and more kids test how tightly you’ll enforce the rules. And you know that if you keep your standards high and your work rigorous, many of them will fail because they’re used to other classes where their learned helplessness is an asset. You also know that when progress report grades are low, you’re the one who will be under scrutiny, not the kids or the grading expectations. The rational thing to do, then, is to give admin what they want.

You’ll let kids retake the exact same test multiple times. You’ll give them a higher grade for a rewritten paper without looking too closely at the revisions. Why wouldn’t you? There’s no reason for you to persevere either; you get paid whether they pass or fail, but there’s less paperwork and fewer meetings and angry emails when they pass.

Parents: just like his teachers, your kid understands incentives. He spends 8-hours a day] in a system that lives and breathes them. And the incentives are all stacked in favor of him spending all his time on whatever he wants. Dopamine from his phone or music or friends will not be vanquished by the self-esteem of completed schoolwork. The feeling of accomplishment from sticking to a daily study schedule is immaterial when you can basically re-spawn your academic career a week before semester finals.

Your kid is being taught to give up early because the system (the state) will ride to his rescue.

That happens all the time at work for you, right?

Risk-Taking

F stands for fail, the Original Sin in any classroom.

When you do something challenging, something you’ve never done before, you’re going to fail. If it’s a worthwhile activity, you’ll probably fail multiple times.

The first step in failure is a willingness to take a risk. You have to try something you’re not already sure you can do.

And that is not what schools teach kids to do. In fact, kids are punished for risk-taking.

Deviate from the teacher’s lecture in an essay?

Gonna cost you.

Raise your hand and get a math question wrong?

(A) Why are you raising your hand, schoolboy? (B) You were wrong, idiot.

Choose a book not on SparkNotes for independent reading?

Unh-unh. You might not get the theme right in your report.

You know which kids are most risk-averse?

AP/IB/Honors kids: AKA high-achievers.

Your 4.0 GPA student’s identity is so tied up in being “smart” that she will avoid anything that might make that label less sticky. She will actually avoid learning something new for fear it might be difficult.

This year I had a young woman in my AP class who came to me confidentially and let me know that after two weeks of daily discussion with her mother and her therapist, it would be okay for her to get a B in my class, so she decided not to drop it after all. (We had a good year, she loved the class but, yes, she did get a B.)

The coercive power of grades — however manipulated now — is still a powerful weapon in the hands of the K12 behaviorists. Your GATE kid is playing hopscotch too. She might be willing to hop a little higher, or at least make it look like she’s attempting to hop, but it’s still just a question of getting to the end.

For her, the bar will be a little higher. Her teachers will expect her to have done everything “well”.

She’s been at this for a while though. She knows what “well” means: (1) listen and (2) obey. The more closely she conforms to the teacher’s worldview, the more cleverly she regurgitates it, the higher her grade.

That actually DOES work in corporate America. It will get you all the way to middle management in cubicle hell. Maybe your girl will even get her own office one day.

But for kids who love learning, for the ones who read voraciously and wouldn’t stop asking, “Why?”, those you had to stop from leaping off things in the service of physics, the kids who want to get dirty (and sometimes bruised) working on the car with dad, the ones so curious about how the toaster works they wrenched it apart?

Those kids disappear in a hurry once they figure out school doesn’t care about their passions and that getting through is as easy as hopscotch. The combination of pointless, easy, and rewarded is the kind of toxic behavior-training at which schools excel.

In the short-term, everybody wins, especially the school system. Kids think they’re doing all right, parents don’t question high marks, and the school administrators look great.

Like I said, it’s a straightforward game that might get you a dedicated parking spot and 3 weeks vacation if you feign interest in front of the right people.

But it’s a low-down dirty shame.

I see the genius in my students. They are ACHING to let it out. But they’re so, so afraid to take any risk that their passions only begin developing once their schooling is done, if ever. They’re so burnt out by the endless hopping, the endless pretense of caring about the same thing in the same way as the person who controls their grade that they don’t have the energy to do the scary, crazy stuff Steve Wozniak or Elon Musk or Muhammad Ali did to change the world.

And these kids? They could, if we told them it’s okay to fail.

But schools can’t do that; it might make administration look bad.

Curiosity (and Creativity)

Education, from the latin, means to draw out from within. It’s an inherently individual pursuit, as unique as a person’s DNA. That means education doesn’t scale.

Enter schooling.

Most societies understand that some level of fundamental cultural knowledge and certain academic skills facilitate human productivity which builds wealth in communities and nations. Individuals recognize that schooling improves personal outcomes as well.

So government-funded schools sound like a win-win.

But I’ll repeat: education doesn’t scale.

What a government can implement at scale is mass schooling, where everyone of the same age learns a set of facts and skills at the same time at the same pace in the same way.

The necessity of rigid scheduling in order to maximize efficiency means some kids get left behind while others are bored silly.

And because of the scale of this operation, it is nearly impossible to slow down and correct misunderstandings of students with language or developmental challenges or speed up for children who need a greater challenge or different approach.

Largely due to this time crunch, the questions and curiosities of children need to be pushed aside or pinned for a later that never comes. In the classrooms with the kindest teachers, children learn that the teacher wishes she could indulge the child, but has to think of the other kids and so must brush aside questions out of an ethical duty to her work. All too often, students who like their teacher learn to shut themselves up out of regard for the rest of the class.

In the classrooms with a teacher who is burnt out, indifferent, or with tunnel-vision on covering the curriculum, those moments of wonder — moments that could ignite a child’s imagination, spawn a career, or drive a young person to change the world — will be brushed aside. Or worse, assigned as additional work that will receive a grade, but no meaningful guidance or feedback.

The school system either stops a child from indulging his curiosity altogether or turns it into yet another box in a game of hopscotch, strangling it in the cradle.

A child quickly learns the system has no room for curiosity. She also learns, all too often, that the teacher can’t help her address her curiosity. Sometimes she learns that she will be punished for expressing wonder aloud.

And without the freedom to indulge your curiosity, you can never be educated; you can only be schooled.

Schooling also prevents making the kind of connections between courses that strengthen and widen neurological growth, the physiological foundation that drives broader, deeper learning.

Worse still, the curious learn in some classrooms that they can derail a class with a well-meaning teacher by feigning curiosity.

In every way it can, whether coincidentally or by design, the system undermines human curiosity and its close cousin: creativity. Think about it: if you don’t wonder why anything works the way it does or happened the way it did, then you have no reason to contemplate changes that would improve the function of a product, the efficiency of a service, or create the conditions that allow certain events to occur or to prevent them from happening again. (For a much more adroit discussion of this topic, you can watch the most-viewed TEDTalk ever: Sir Ken Robinson wondering aloud “Do Schools Kill Creativity?)

Just so you all know, when a kid showed curiosity about a tangentially related topic in any class I taught, I spent time during class or during break listening to his questions and urging him to ask more. I didn’t always have answers, but I could often point him in directions where he might find them. I probably sent half of my students down rabbit-holes at some point in my classroom — and that may have been the most valuable work I ever did.

I’d love to advise that you not let school beat curiosity out of your child, but I can tell you with near certainty that if your kid plays by the rules to get good grades — if he’s “good” at hopscotch and willing to pretend he enjoys it — they will almost certainly succeed in destroying his desiree to ask interesting questions that don’t have a multiple-choice answer.

Integrity

School turns your kid into a phony.

One of the main goals of mass public schooling as implemented by progressives in the early 20th century was to take immigrants and turn them into good little WASPs, or at least minimize their German-ness, their Irish-ness — really any -ness that came with loud-talking, hard-drinking, and bureaucrat-ignoring renegade behavior.

School is primarily a conformity engine. That’s how the Prussians designed it. While American community schools kept all the children in one room where the youngest saw the examples of and gleaned knowledge from older kids and older kids protected and supported those younger than them, Prussians placed children into age-segregated classes where the teacher was the sole authority.

Prussians create soldiers. What could be better than to apply that military ethic to factories? The American industrialists of the late 19th century saw that the Prussian model would produce obedient workers and poured money into "free" education to train unruly immigrants into factory drones. Leveled, age-segregated education was born.

John Taylor Gatto explains its importation into America this way: “[C]ompulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.”¹

This system has been thoroughly adopted by our overlords. They LOVE what it does.

I know what you’re thinking. “But DT: our schools are terrible. They’re failing poor minority children at rates pushing 100%. Kids with learning disabilities are socially promoted and gifted kids are ignored. Kids in the middle do okay, but everybody is bored out of their minds. My kids went to school reading, but now they rarely pick up a book. How can this be considered success by our government?”

Because the system does exactly what the industrialists wanted and George Carlin chided us for: create obedient workers just smart enough to run the machines but not smart enough to question the system.

As long as you leave him in school, your kid learns that it is far, far better to blend in than to stick out, just like the army trains its recruits to do. His unique abilities will be squashed instead of encouraged, thus he won’t use them. His sweet idiosyncracies will be mocked, so he won’t show them. His beliefs that don’t align with the teacher’s will be punished, so he won’t share them. Subjects that spark his curiosity will be buried under busywork, so he won’t pursue them.

In other words, moms and dads, your child’s personal development will be strictly curtailed until he leaves school, and will only occur if school hasn’t totally eradicated his curiosity and his ability to focus his attention — which it does exceedingly well through its fragmented structure and rafts of pointless busywork.

Your child can put on the persona of a rebel. He can play-pretend to be any type he wants, but any real digression from the system’s plan for him (which is identical to it’s plan for most of the other kids) is nearly impossible, not because the teachers don’t want your child to be engaged in his education, but because it’s too hard to individualize it. The system precludes it; ask any parent of a child on a special education plan and you’ll likely get an earful of anecdotal evidence of school’s failures to tailor education to suit the needs of a child with learning difficulties.

Your kid who loves airplanes and would like to write a paper about lift in his English class? He’ll be blocked and forced to write a paper from a justice/equity/diversity angle.

And that’s where the lying comes in.

See, if you care enough to be reading this Substack, you probably care very much about what your child is being subjected to in school on a daily basis. In fact, you just might care enough to make a stink about it.

And your kid knows you. He also knows that a teacher and/or his peers can extract a heavy toll for the audacity of a parent who questions the classroom practice of an “Educator”.

So when you ask him what happened at school, he’s going to tell you: “Nothing.”

I’ve read other commentators on K12 education say that parents should pose queries obliquely. They should try to hide their motives and avoid pointed questions that might raise a child’s suspicion.

But isn’t that dishonest too?

So not only does school make liars out of our kids, it reduces us to sneaking and subterfuge in order to protect them, in hopes of inflicting the least collateral damage possible.

The ONLY way I can see for parents to free themselves from the lies (have our cake) but keep the kids in school (and eat it too) is to explicitly tell a child his grades are immaterial; he should stand up for what he believes, regardless of the consequences.

However, even with express permission, you're still putting a minor in a room full of people he doesn’t want to alienate and, without any backup, asking him to speak truth to power. Either that or you tell him to go-along-to-get-along, compromising your values, in order to gain access to next-level indoctrination camp: college.

At this point, I’ll pause and ask: why are you playing this game? Your kid only gets one shot at this time of his life, and if the “ethical” thing to do is to tell him not to worry at all about grades, why entrust his education to people who rely on the coercive power of grades to get him to learn?

I’ll try to quantify this in my next post, but unless your kid loves the social aspects of middle/high school, and you’re relatively confident it will have few deleterious effect on him overall, that has to be enough for your family because you’re not getting much else. In my experience, the system actively prevents meaningful learning.

Is socializing worth his integrity? Is it worth yours?

If you say yes, because “college”, that mid-level management suite beckons, but it will have cost him things that are unquantifiable in financial terms: in other words, priceless.

No solutions; only trade-offs

Twenty years of watching kids passed through the system convinced me that the costs of public schooling vastly outweigh its benefits.

Unfortunately, most parents don’t look for them, they only look for the benefits, and they restrict their investigation to grade reports.

As long as the grades look good, parents don’t see the costs, but please take a moment to do so.

What could your son be if he learns discipline at a young age and he’s held to high standards? If when things get tough, there isn’t an easy out? If his curiosity is indulged by people who love him? If he isn’t forced to minimize himself to fit into a system that serves the adults working in it first?

What could he become? How soon could he become that man?

You can find out. But not if you keep him enrolled.

1. https://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm