The Rat Race at Schools

What is the Rat Race? The Rat Race is where you are hurrying down a path that is supposed to lead somewhere good, but you never seem to reach that somewhere. You are driven on by guilt and hope toward the promised land, but when you get there you find it slips away and is again just out of reach. The more you strive toward completion the more your work has piled up. If you are lucky you get to the point where you say to yourself, "Why am I doing this? Whatever the promised land is like, it is not worth the effort I am making or the amount of work I am doing." The problem with the rat race is that there is no pleasure in the race, only in the reaching of the promised land and this is elusive because whenever you reach it, it moves, and you must begin again to strive to reach it.

Are Students in the Rat Race? Yes, this exactly the situation students are in. Students are constantly trying to live up to everybody's expectations, but their own. Most gradually change, from people who take pleasure in everything they do, to people who take no pleasure in doing anything. They seek pleasure in some elusive final outcome, which when they finally get there has generated yet another final outcome. Passing the test moves you up a grade, getting a good score at graduation means you can go to a prestigious college or university, doing well in the college or university means you can get a good job, getting a good job means you can keep up with the Jones'. John Holt in his book "The Underachieving School" puts it like this:

"They do not feel in control of their own lives. Outside forces hurry them along with no pause for breath or thought, for purposes not their own, to an unknown end. Society does not seem to them a community that they are preparing to join and shape like the city of an ancient Greek; it is more like a remote and impersonal machine that will one day bend them to its will."

Who or What is Responsible? Well certainly parents are responsible, the community, society and culture must all take some responsibility, but the schools themselves must accept the major share of the blame. In his book "The Underachieving School" at the beginning of his chapter on the Rat Race John Holt minces no words as to who the culprits are.

"Most of what is said and written about the tremendous pressure for high grades that burden so many young people today implies that schools and colleges are not really responsible for these pressures, that they are the innocent victims of anxious and ambitious parents on the one hand, and the inexorable demands of an increasingly complicated society on the other. There is some truth in this, but not much. Here and there are schools which that have been turned, against their will, into high pressure learning factories by the demands of parents. But in large part, educators themselves are the source and cause of these pressures. Increasingly, instead of developing intellect, character, and potential of the students in their care, they are using them for their own purposes in a contest inspired by vanity and aimed at winning money and prestige. It is only in theory, today, that educational institutions serve the student; in fact, the real job of a student at any ambitious institution is, by his performance, to enhance the reputation of that institution.

This is true not only of colleges and universities. I have heard teachers of secondary and even elementary schools say, in reply to the just claim that students were overworried and overworked, that if students were less burdened, their examination scores would go down and the reputation of the school would suffer."

The School Product. The whole business of the schools has been turned on it's head. It is no longer a matter of what the school can do for the students, but rather what the students can do for the schools. John Holt in his book "The Underachieving School" continues.

"Not long ago, I went to an alumni dinner of a leading New England Preparatory school and there heard one of the faculty, in a speech, boast about the percentage of students who had been admitted to a college of their first choice, the number who had gone directly into the sophomore class at college, and so on. The tone was that of a manufacturer bragging that his product was better than those of his competitors. Conversely, when the faculty of a school meets to discuss the students who are not doing well in their studies, the tone is likely to be that of management considering an inferior product, one not worthy of bearing the company's name and which they are about to drop from the line. There is sometimes concern and regret that the school is not doing well enough by the child; and much more often there is concern, and resentment, that the child is not doing well enough by the school."

"The blunt fact is that educators' chief concern is to be able to say, to college-hunting parents on the one hand, and to employee-hunting executives on the other, that their college is harder to get into, and therefore better, than other colleges, and therefore the one to which the best students should be sent and from which the best employee and graduate students can be drawn."

Pressure and Manipulation.

Guilt. Although the major tool for manipulating students into working harder is fear, the teachers, administrators, and other interested parties in education have other tools as well; bribery, irony, sarcasm and of course guilt. Guilt is the important one. Parents will say "I have worked my fingers to the bone to send you to the best school I can, and this how you repay me." There follows any or all of the following; by getting low marks, not working hard, loafing, being lazy, and of course the big no no 'failing'. Teachers also use this ploy. They will try to tell students that by not working hard enough they are unworthy of the extra time and effort, he the teacher, has put into trying to help them; that they are ungrateful for his concern and patience; and do not deserve to be showered with the brilliant gems of wisdom and knowledge he has so kindly unlocked for them.

School administrators, not to be outdone, will have no hesitation in conveying to students that they are not pulling their weight, that by their bad behavior or laziness they are letting down the school or even dragging the good name of the school down into the muck, that they are unworthy of the excellent facilities, teachers, and opportunity the school is offering them. The whole idea of helping the student to learn has been eclipsed by concerns for the school itself, its survival, growth, and accumulation of prestige. John Holt continues in "The Underachieving School".

"I do not think it is in any way an exaggeration to say that many students, particularly the ablest ones are being as mercilessly exploited by ambitious schools as they are by business and commerce, which use them as consumers and subject them to heavy and destructive psychological pressures."

The Work Load of Students. In his book "The Underachieving School" John Holt continues to explain how homework starts to pile up from about the age of thirteen.

"In such schools, children from the age of twelve or thirteen on are very likely to have after a long day at school, two, three or more hours of homework a night - with more over the week-end. The load grows heavier as children get older. Long before they reach college, many children are putting in a seventy-hour week - or more. Children have not worked such long hours since the early and brutal days of the Industrial Revolution."

"One of my own students, a girl just turned fourteen, said not long ago, more in the spirit of wry amusement than of complaint, that she went home every night on a commuter train with businessmen, most of whom could look forward to an evening of relaxation with their families, while she had at least two or three hours' more work to do. And probably a good many of those men find their work during the day less difficult and demanding than her schoolwork is for her."

The Effects of these Pressures on Students. The effects of these pressures on children are many and all harmful. John Holt in his book "The Underachieving School" suggests the following.

1. A need to be always right and never wrong.

   "They create in young people an exaggerated concern with getting right answers and avoiding mistakes; they drive them into defensive strategies of learning and behavior that choke off their intellectual powers and make real learning all but impossible."

2. An inability to sort out their beliefs or establish an identity.

   [On Teenagers] "In short, it is at this time that he begins not only to know himself but also consciously to create himself, to feel intuitively what Thoreau meant when he said that every man is his own masterpiece... A person's identity is made up of those things - qualities, tastes, beliefs - that are uniquely his... More specifically, it is the people he admires, the books, the music, the games, the interests, that he chooses for himself and likes, whether or not anyone else likes them, or whether or not they are supposed to be 'good' or 'worthwhile'; the experiences that he needs to seek out for himself and that add to his life. An adolescent needs time to do this kind of seeking, tasting, selecting and rejecting... We do not give him enough."

3. An excessive concern with what others think of them.

   "In addition by putting him in a position where he is always being judged and where his whole future may depend on those judgments, we require the adolescent to direct his attention, not to who he is or ought to be or wants to be but who we think he is and want him to be. He has to keep thinking about the impression he is making on us - his elders, the world. Thus we help to exaggerate what is already, in most young people, a serious and crippling fault - an excessive concern with what others think of them."

4. A loss of their own sense of worth.

   "Since our judgments are more often than not critical, unfavorable, even harsh, we exaggerate another fault, equally serious and crippling - a tendency to imagine that other people think less well of them than in fact they do, or what is worse, that they do not deserve to be well thought of. Youth ought to be a time when people acquire a sense not just of their own identity but also of their own worth. We make it almost certain to be the very opposite... More and more the only acceptable goal is to get into a prestige college; to do anything else is to fail. Thus I hear boys and girls say, 'I wanted to go to so-and-so, but I'm not good enough.' It is outrageous that they should think this way, that they should judge themselves stupid and worthless because of the opinion of some remote college admissions officer."

5. A loss of their sense of power, purpose and mission in life.

   The pressures we put on young people also tend to destroy their sense of power and purpose... "This, I think, what Paul Goodman meant when he said that we have imposed on the elite of our younger generation a morale fit for slaves. We have given them a sense not of mission and vocation, but of subjection and slavery. They do not seek more knowledge and power so that they may one day do great work of their own choosing; instead, they do their tasks, doggedly and often well because they dare not refuse."

6. A loss of their sense of joy or pleasure in both work and play.

   "Along with their sense of mission, we destroy to a very considerable extent their sense of joy, both in work and leisure. Thoreau once wrote: 'The truly efficient laborer will not crowd his day with work, but saunter to the task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.' The man is badly cheated who has never felt that he could not wait to get back to his work and, so feeling, hurled himself into it with a fierce joy. Not only is he cheated; the work he does is probably neither well done nor much worth doing."

The Consequences of these Pressures for Society. John Holt in his book "The Underachieving School" suggests the following.

1. An increase in psychological disturbance.

2. An increase in suicide.

3. An increase in overuse of alcohol and drug use.

4. An increase in cheating.

   

   "We also read of a great increase in all kinds of cheating, not among unsuccessful students, but among superior students whose grades would be very good even if they did not cheat. It is no small thing that large numbers of our young people, supposedly our ablest and best, are becoming convinced that they must cheat in order to succeed; that success is so important that it justifies cheating."

   

5. A debasement and corruption of the act of learning.

   "But the broader and more general consequence of the pressure for grades is that it has debased and corrupted the act of learning itself. Not by what we say but by what we do, by the way we hand out rewards and prizes, we convince many young people that it is not for the joy and satisfaction of understanding that we learn but in order to get something for ourselves; and what counts in school and college is not knowing and understanding, but making someone think you know and understand; that knowledge is valuable , not because it helps us deal better with the problems of private and public life, but because it has become a commodity that can be sold for fancy prices on the market. School has become a kind of racket, and success in school and hence in life, depends on learning how to beat it."

Raising the Hoop. If there is one single thing that makes schools a rat race more than any other, it is this; that no matter how well students may do at school, it is never enough. If too many students pass a test they simply make the test harder.

John Holt in his book "The Underachieving School" puts it like this.

"I think of a student of mine, years ago, kept on campus week-end after week-end, for not having his work done - presumably so that he could use the time to get it done. On one such week-end, I found him working on one of his hobbies, a small printing press. In exasperation I said to him, 'If you'd just do the things you have to do and get them out of the way, then you could be free to do the things you want to do.'

With tired wisdom far greater than mine, he said, mildly: 'No you can't. They just give you more things you have to do.' It is truer now than it was then. Schools cannot bring themselves to say, 'That's enough.' No matter how high they raise the hoop, if a child manages to jump through it, they take his success as a signal that they must raise it still higher."

Can the Schools be Changed so as to Stop or Avoid the Rat Race? John Holt is a bit pessimistic about this as follows from "The Underachieving School".

"Can the schools and colleges be persuaded to do away with, or greatly reduce, their demands for high grades? There are many reasons for thinking they cannot.

1. First, they do not seem aware of the harm that their competition for prestige is doing to American youth and American education. In fact they take quite an opposite view, talking about higher standards and upgrading education.

2. Second, they would say that they have found from experience that it is the students with high test scores who have the best chance of staying in college. But this because so much of their teaching is based on getting high test scores; if they reduced the importance of exams and marks, they would reduce the need for getting only those students who were good at taking exams.

3. Third, the colleges would say that unless they make entrance difficult by demanding high test scores, they will have too many applicants to choose from. But they have too many as it is, and must ultimately make many choices on the basis of criteria other than test scores. Why not make those criteria more important and if they still have too many applicants, choose from them by lot? Under such a system, a student applying to a popular college would know that his chances of being admitted were slight, but would feel, if he was not admitted, that it was chance that kept him out - not that he was no good."

How can Schools be Changed? Well, we can dream, but there are indeed many things the colleges can do, many things the students and prep. schools can do. John Holt in his book "The Underachieving School" makes a few suggestions.

"Our schools have let themselves think that all the bargaining power lies with the colleges. But this not so. Our prestige colleges need good students as much as the students need the colleges. Suppose more and more schools began saying to colleges, 'Our best students are fed up with grinding for grades; they want to learn for the interest and joy of learning. Unless you show them, and us, that you are making grades less important, they are going to look for other colleges to go to, and we are going to help them.' Might this not change the picture? After all pressure can be exerted both ways."

"Perhaps a number of prestige colleges could be persuaded to agree to say jointly that they would admit some fixed percentage of applicants each year, despite low test scores, if the applicants had other important qualifications. If they found, as I believe they would, that such students were on the whole as useful and valuable as students getting very high scores, they could raise the percentage. Such a policy would encourage primary and secondary schools and teachers to work for goals other than high test scores, and it would give hope to at least a number of very talented young people who are not good at taking exams."

"Taking the longer view, I cannot see why any college should not admit anyone and everyone who applied for admission. What if they get filled up? Then let them do what the theatre or movie house or concert or lecture hall does - hang out a sign that there is no more room, and that people will have to wait for the next performance. If someone wants so badly to go to Hotshot U. that he will wait four years to get in, then they would be wise to let him wait in line until there is room. Most students will quite sensibly go to other places nearly as good where the line is not so long. Let overcrowding be the students' problem, not the institution's. In the same way, let a student judge whether or not he will be able to do the work at a college. If I go to a concert hall to hear a difficult piece of music, nobody gives me an exam at the door to make sure I going to be able to understand it. It may in fact be too difficult and I may not understand or like it, and so waste my time and money. That is my risk and my misfortune. The same is true when I buy a book, or go to a play, or to a lecture or a museum. Let the student take the same risk."

Getting out of the Rat Race. So what is the answer? Must students extract themselves from the rat race, should teachers help them to extract themselves, should parents ease up on the pressure, or should the institutions of education remodel themselves so that a rat race never begins? The answer is of course, all of the above. Students should be trying to live up to their own expectations. They should gradually change, to become people who increasingly take pleasure in everything they do. They should find pleasure in everything they learn. The pleasure should be in the journey, in the feeling of improvement, and ever increasing competence. The outcome from this can only be students/people who are more intelligent, more creative, more motivated and who will have a life long love affair with learning.