The primary reason why kids don’t like school is because they like being free, and school doesn’t provide much freedom.
Those of us that have gone through the system know that school is a prison, but only a few of us would dare say it out loud. We don’t want to sound ridiculous before our peers.
If we were to describe school for what it really is—a prison, then we would have to explain to our kids, why we keep sending them to such a place. The government would also have to explain why millions of shillings are being spent every financial year to empower a “prison enterprise”.
People would want to know why the government has made it mandatory for all children 6 years and above to go to “prison”. If you don’t send your child to “prison”, the government sends you to prison.
If you don’t believe that school is a prison, then you have a duty to explain to your children, how school is different from prison. Just like prison, when you go to school, you have to think and act a certain way— if you refuse to fall in line, you’re punished, or even worse, expelled.
Children want to learn by following their interest, but in school, they are told to abandon their interests and, instead, simply do what the teacher says. This is precisely why they hate school.
If you provide children with the right tools for learning, they will learn on their own. There is no hardcore proof to suggest that children who are sent to school come out better than children that are simply provided with learning tools, and left to learn on their own.
It is also evident that most teachers don’t have a full understanding of cognitive psychology—-they don’t know how best to teach certain students. This is because all teachers are required to follow a standard curriculum issued by government. The curriculum presupposes that all children learn the same way. By this logic, children are also assessed the same way.
We’ve all seen kids that are intelligent and yet they seem not to learn what they are being taught no matter how much somebody tries to force-feed knowledge into their heads.
Kids are wired with a desire to explore their environment; they have a strong urge to learn about the world around them—discover how things work. So if they are predisposed to want to learn, why then do they lose interest in learning when they get to school? Before starting school, they are usually excited about signing up but everything changes when they start school.
School is fun for children in pre-school and elementary school. But majority of learners above 10 years view school as a prison. Sadly, by the time they make 10, most would have been brainwashed to believe that school is for their own good and therefore it cannot be referred to as prison.
I attended Entebbe Kindergarten for my pre-school and Lake Victoria School for my primary education. These were the best schools in Entebbe, at the time. It’s where the town’s elite sent their kids. My mom believed that taking me to these schools would help me get grounded. She wasn’t entirely wrong except for the fact that I had a terrible experience at school.
I loved pre-school because there was a lot of playing and creativity. My second best moments were during the social studies lessons by Mr Lubega. Mr Lubega was my in-law— he was married to my half-sister Susan. This guy was the best story teller of all time. His class was probably the only one where I ever paid full attention. He had a way of getting you sucked-in. I would watch him with awe, as he told us tales of our history as a nation. He was so cool, I wanted to be like him.
My worst moments were during exams. I still get nightmares, thinking about those tests. The school had a tradition of punishing those that would score below average. For most of my time at Lake Victoria School, my name was on the list of worst performers in class.
But being punished is not the reason I hated school. I hated school because I was being forced to think like other kids in my class, yet I was so different. I was one of the worst performers in my class but I’ve always wondered— had I been moved to a better learning environment, is there a chance that I could have turned out to be one of the smartest kids in class? Albert Einstein wrote, “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
So, is it possible that the kids we consider dumb because they are terrible in class are geniuses in other fields? Is it possible that these kids have hidden potential waiting to be discovered?
It’s important that we identify ways in which to empower kids that have been disenfranchised by the system. The system is designed to reward only the kids that conform to the set standards of academic excellence. Kids that are wired to think different are marginalized and branded academic failures. It should be a moral imperative for us to cause a paradigm shift in how we teach.
Teaching without words
In most of our schools, the most dominant way of conveying ideas is through words. But for some of the kids with learning disabilities, words can be huge language barriers. I know because I was such a kid. As a learner with dyslexia, I struggled to catch-up with the rest of my peers. Research has confirmed that over 70% of the students fail to learn using words.
So how do we pass-on instruction to students without necessarily using words? I believe that we need to consider interactive software as a viable alternative. Visual games with informative feedback are the best learning tools for kids with learning disabilities. These games can be developed for complex subjects like math and science. Such tools can easily be integrated into a homeschooling curriculum.
One laptop per child project
One laptop per child program is a project that was started to give kids laptops around the world, to help them educate themselves.
In 2012 they took laptops to 2 villages in Ethiopia; the children in this village could neither read nor write. The team took the boxes and just laid them on the ground, unopened.
According the Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the project,
- Within 4 minutes, one child opened the box and switched on the laptop.
- Within 5 days, they were using 47 apps per child per day.
- Within 2 weeks they were singing nursery rhymes in English around the village
- After 5 months they had hacked android.
- All this was achieved without a single adult giving them instructions on how it’s done.
So maybe kids can actually teach themselves. But the policy makers in Africa are backward and out of revolutionary ideas. But they won’t be able stop what’s coming.
Why we educate
Before you take your child to school, you should have very clear goals. For most of the upper and lower middle class families in Uganda, the goal is for the learner to graduate with honors and get a 6 figure salary job with government or a multi-national corporation. But the most fundamental goal of education should be:
- Developing critical thinking.
- Building a global perspective.
- Nurturing the learner’s sensitivity towards other world views.
- Being inspired to take personal action.
- Developing a deep love for learning.
If a learner can acquire all the above qualities, then there’s no limit to how much they can be, do or have in life. There’ll be no door they can’t open.
Parents need to appreciate that there is more than one type of intelligence. While schools are making children more academically intelligent, they are diminishing their creative intelligence. School teaches kids how to do things a certain way—“Go to school, get a good job. If you don’t do that, then you can’t be successful in life.”
If that were true, then how is it possible that a straight C student like me can start a tech company and run it successfully for 7 years now? There must be something about learners like me that can’t be measured by academic intelligence alone.
There are not enough parents out there encouraging their children to go down the road less traveled—the creative path. Away from the conventional pattern of— “High school—University—Job”.
Learners that will choose to follow the creative plane will open their own doors. They will create any future they wish to have.
When I look at my daughter Audrey, I don’t see an accountant or lawyer. I see a creative thinker. I see a potential interior designer, photographer, florist, copywriter, poet, movie director….
I see her living on the creative plane. A plane where everything is possible. I dare you to be that parent that pushes you child to stray from the system.
