School is Supposed to be Boring
or, The Value of High School in the Internet Age
Introduction: Why?
Imagine this common scenario. A teacher is starting a new lesson on some abstract idea — imaginary numbers, angular momentum, Shakespearean prosody, something like that — and a student asks the following question: “Why are we learning this?”
You’ve heard this before. You’ve probably asked it before. As an English teacher who teaches novels and plays frequently, I hear this question so often (though not as often as math teachers, I’m sure) that I’ve learned to all but tune it out or give some sarcastic response:
Student: Why do we have to learn about poetry in school?
Me: I don’t know.
But now that I’m several years into teaching at the high-school level, I’ve started to reconsider this question. It turns out that answering this question honestly is actually harder than it seems, and it gets harder and harder to answer the more difficult your content is.
Think about it. How would you answer a student who asked you this? One option is to appeal to the authority of your curriculum and say, “Because it’s on the test.” This is a relatively safe answer because even if the student pushes further, there is always a higher authority to appeal to. It’s on the test because it’s in the curriculum because it’s on the big test because it’s in the standards because the state follows the federal guidelines because the state was incentivized to do so. If you have a problem, call your senator.
I’ve told this to students before: I’m sure many teachers have. But I’m not convinced by this answer. It implies a powerlessness, a lack of faith even, in your subject. There’s also the issue that telling a student they must learn about iambic pentameter because it’s on the test is basically the same as telling them they have to learn it because “I said so.” Nobody wants to be told that.
The truth is that the content that is regularly taught in high schools — think of all those “required reading” sections in bookstores or the kinds of math problems you might find in an SAT practice book — is actually difficult to justify in practical terms. Students, not nearly as oblivious as we sometimes (implicitly) imagine they are, realize this early on and communicate it by asking, “When am I going to use this in my life?”
Another approach, you might think, is to frame high-school content in terms of, what my administrators like to call, “buy-in.” A principal once told me, “The trick is to show them how this stuff matters in the real world.” This is all well and good when you’re teaching arithmetic or basic reading. I don’t think any person has ever questioned why they have to learn to read or count. But how exactly am I, an English teacher, supposed to connect Macbeth to the “real world?”
Seriously, how? You might think this is easy, that I’m just being annoying, that Macbeth is the easiest thing in the world to teach in terms of real-world value. “Shakespeare,” you might say, “teaches us about ourselves.” This is true. There is something to be learned about ambition, about pride, about guilt, about power, about nihilism from Shakespeare. But this is also not what students mean when they ask why they have to read a fantastical story of a mad Scottish king. What they really want to know is what the Thane of Cawdor has to do with the real world of getting a job, paying the bills, and acquiring wealth. They want to know what tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow has to do with today today today. The truth might be that it’s all sound and fury.
This problem isn’t exclusive to English class. It’s probably worse, actually, in math. Walk into any junior-level math course and you’re walking into a sea of abstractions: imaginary numbers, inverse functions, and sin waves. Of course none of these things are useless. Science and math have given society uncountable gifts. But remember, most school districts force every single student to take every one of these types of classes, and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why. Does everybody actually need to learn this stuff? The answer, I think, depends on how you look at school and the kind of world you think we live in.
Things get really tricky for you if you think that high school subjects should be giving students real-life or career skills. Most people generally considered successful in the US (think the white-picket fence, mortgage, 2.5 kids type) live their lives in blissful ignorance of complex numbers. Or if they don’t, they probably live their lives in blissful ignorance of the works of Samuel Beckett or the difference between RNA and DNA. Even most teachers do. It’s a common trope in any particular department to hear people say that “I just don’t understand <other subject>,” or, “I was just never very good at <other subject>.” Yet we say this in a building where we force every human being to learn every subject despite their particular interest.
Why do we do this? Are we torturing students? Are we forcing them to learn everything and thus nothing? Are teachers actually the bad guys students often picture them as?
No. School only looks Kafkaesque if you think of it as a place for training rather than a place for learning. To illustrate my point, let’s turn to Oscar Wilde.
The Usefulness of Uselessness
The New Yorker recently ran a piece about the decline of English majors in higher ed:
…from 2012 to 2020 the number of graduated humanities majors at Ohio State’s main campus fell by forty-six per cent. Tufts lost nearly fifty per cent of its humanities majors, and Boston University lost forty-two. Notre Dame ended up with half as many as it started with, while suny Albany lost almost three-quarters. Vassar and Bates — standard-bearing liberal-arts colleges — saw their numbers of humanities majors fall by nearly half. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating thirteen majors, including English, history, and philosophy, for want of pupils.
These data seems to demonstrate a shift in attitudes towards education. Many of the students— especially the poorer ones— surveyed in the studies the article quotes talk about return on investment being a high priority when selecting a major. You can’t, as everybody knows, pay the bills by reciting Thomas Hardy. So, as colleges and universities adjust their faculties to meet demand for STEM-type degrees, how should high schools respond? Should high schools be focusing on preparing students for success in a higher-ed marketplace dominated by career-prepatory STEM degrees and ditch most humanities all together? Is the study of the human past destined to be a privileged hobby of the wealthy? I hope not.
It is, however, difficult to disagree with students who, more often than ever, are beginning to question the curricular status quo. If “usefulness” means “useful in the job market,” it is quite correct to call most high-school curriculum useless.
But useless does not mean bad. Oscar Wilde, in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray wrote, “All art is quite useless,” but he did not mean it as an insult. I say high school is the same. High school is useless, but that’s why it’s important.
Of course we, as educated adults, know this already — nobody who does a crossword puzzle or reads a book about the Napoleonic Wars does so because they want to become better accountants. Rather, educated adults who watch Ken Burns or play sudoku have learned the thing that all of us educators want our students to learn: that there is value in using your brain to solve abstract problems and that this value has very little to offer in the way of explicit material payoff, at least not right away. But sometimes educated adults — a subset of which group includes teachers — forget that children in high school are not educated adults and, for them, the value of learning is not yet self evident and must be taught. In other words, there is some meta teaching-about-learning that needs to happen. But we must be careful when teaching this type of value in order to make sure we aren’t repeating the same, tired mantras our teachers told us: that somehow life leads directly from high school-geometry to CFO of Google. It doesn’t. So instead of this, we need to be honest with ourselves and with the children who depend on us for an education and live by the idea that knowledge is valuable for its own sake.
What I’m arguing is that the point of learning about, say, the Seven Years’ War is simply to learn more about the Seven Years’ War. We learn Shakespeare to learn Shakespeare. The more we bend over backwards to try to prove real-world relevance of our abstract topics, the less connected our topics tend to feel. The overall aim of a high school education, when viewed this way, is quite literally to make people more well-rounded, knowledgeable human beings. Why would anybody think this is a bad thing? To think like this, though, requires an admission, and it might be a hard one for most of us to make. But, here it is. When you are teaching high-level courses on things like poetry and calculus, there really is no direct connection between your CCSS-aligned, objective-driven lesson plans and material success in a free market. Why would we even want this to be the case? Academic success and financial success are two different types of achievements and they should remain so. Of course there are correlations between performance in school and performance in the job market. But, in my experience, these correlations are less to do with the actual content and more to do with the system of grades and academic hierarchies that funnel students into certain channels.
A question worth asking, maybe, is why do students and teachers think like this? Well part of the blame is on us as secondary-school teachers. We tell children that school is preparing them for the so-called real world. The problem is, though, that after, say, 8th grade, what type of world we are preparing them for is never explicitly stated and is, even for somebody who literally crafts curricula for a living, frustratingly abstract and nebulous. In what ways, exactly, is an 18-year-old senior more prepared for the world than a 14-year-old freshman? and, more importantly, how much of that preparation is thanks to high school? and if any of it is owed to the school, how much of it is owed to the curriculum and how much to the complex and varied social structures present in every high school building?
If teachers can’t even answer these questions, maybe students aren’t just being petulant when they ask, “When will I need this in the real world?” Maybe they actually want to know. Maybe they’d like to know what type of world is out there and how exactly we are preparing them for it. Based on the gymnastics some schools do to justify their content, one might start thinking that in order to check out in a grocery store you have to somehow evoke Euler’s equation or to finance a car you need to understand behavioral economics. This simply isn’t the case. One can live a perfectly ordinary, 9–5 life in blissful ignorance of the quadratic equation. Again, most teachers do. I think a lot of us are guilty of this thinking, which is not to say our assumptions are arbitrary — we teach content we love for its own sake and then try to work backwards and assign real-world, material value to it. I’m saying we should stop doing this.
If instead we told students they are learning hard, high-level concepts not because they are automatically meaningful to everybody, but rather because skills and content are themselves not only worth it from a personal growth and consciousness standpoint, but that learning itself is a transferable skill, then we wouldn’t have to constantly fight against this capitalistic, content-justifying mentality. If we can think like this — and genuinely believe it as educators — then maybe we might actually start agreeing with our students. Maybe learning about the causes of World War I won’t help you land a job designing sneakers at Converse. Maybe the only reason to read Milton is because it’s Milton. Maybe art is useless but that’s precisely what makes it useful. Maybe, just maybe, the value of a challenge is the challenge, and maybe the culmination of four years of high school isn’t preparation for some career, but rather a general increase in empathy, compassion, and human consciousness. Is there not value in being conscious and aware of the world in which you must live? Do we all have to aspire to be dead-eyed automatons clocking in and out of jobs?
Perhaps if we start thinking and teaching like this, we can get students to grasp a concept a lot of us educated middle-class people seem to know implicitly: that learning is its own reward.
But learning is hard. And we need to stop lying about it.
The Hard Truth
Talk to most people — including high school students— and you won’t find anybody who thinks learning in general is bad. Yet, saying that “learning” in an abstract sense is important is different from saying hard concepts are worth the effort required to actually understand them. It goes back to another grand cliché that says it’s not writing that’s fun, it’s having written. In other words, we all like the idea of learning, but not the realities.
All of us teachers have seen this problem in action before, even if we haven’t noted it or named it. Imagine a lesson that starts off strong. Maybe you dress up like Abraham Lincoln and give his Gettysburg Address. You nail it. Kids are invested. They clap. They love it. They ask questions. Then you give them the summative assessment that asks them to draw connections between rhetorical devices in Lincoln’s speech with the political realities of the time, and they bomb. Something like this has happened to all of us. But why?
What’s going on is that in the above scenario, the Abraham Lincoln teacher is mistaking engagement with entertainment for engagement with learning. To fix this, we as high school teachers have to do some difficult things. One, which we’ve already talked about, is to admit that there is generally not a direct connection between our content and the job market. But the other is to admit something much more taboo: that learning is, and ought to be, hard.
This is especially true in secondary school. We lie to students when we tell them learning is exciting, that reading is entertaining, that math is invigorating. In reality, these activities are, generally speaking, not fun. Sure, having solved a hard math problem is fun, having read a great book is fun, having learned about World War II is fun. But it’s important to remember these activities are typically seen as fun by educated adults who’ve already learned to value learning and who, more importantly, already have the skills necessary to accomplish these tasks.
My suggestion here is to embrace the idea that learning is — and ought to be — hard. When learning something feels hard and boring and tedious, that’s when it’s most important to keep going. This, in my opinion, is the key to a strong humanities education: if studying humanities is valuable less in the ends than in the process, studying humanities ought to exercise the brain as much as possible. In other words, the true value of a liberal arts education is the training it gives your brain in critical thinking and problem solving. The actual knowledge is much less important.
Now, I’m not suggesting that classrooms should be capital-B Boring. There would be no point in becoming a teacher if you didn’t want to occasionally practice your standup routine. What I am saying is it’s disingenuous to tell children that learning is fun. When a student hears “fun,” they are going to think “passively entertaining” because most of the entertainment in our modern, comfortable lives we (young and old) consider “fun” is actually, simply put, passive. Real learning will never be fun in the same way watching an action movie is. Closely reading and explicating lines from Homer will never be as fun as watching Timothy Chalamet swing a sword around. Perhaps the challenge lies in embracing boredom, in teaching students to disconnect from, and in fighting tooth-and-nail against, the accepted notion that the most important virtue in life is the pursuit of entertainment.
Part of the problem is we all tend to forget what high school actually asks students to do. In other words, you might disagree with me and argue that you’ve had fun learning before. Maybe you had a great time learning about relativity, or Alexander’s conquests, or the Fermi Paradox. But there are a few things to consider about these types of examples and this way of thinking. One, as I’ve already mentioned, we, as educated readers, come into these types of experiences equipped with the skills required to grasp them and also the ingrained belief— based on experience— that learning has self-evident value. Two, learning a series of interesting facts — the universe has a speed limit, Alexander was Macedonian, and that the universe appears empty but statistically speaking it shouldn’t be— is quite different from the type of learning that we do in a modern American high school. In other words, even if you’re amped up about light-speed paradoxes, try to prove them using a Minkowski diagram, or try to understand Greek case endings in order to examine a primary source from Alexander’s time, or try to perform the necessary statistical analyses to determine how close to correct all the various layers of the implications within the Fermi paradox are to really see what I mean when I say learning isn’t fun: it’s work. Learning something new is painful, is discipline-testing, is scary, and is worth it.
Just because something is hard work doesn’t mean we should avoid it, of course. What it means is we should stop misrepresenting our content to children and teach them that the work we do in school has real human value separate from the job market.
Conclusion
I think there are two ways the US’s education can go. It will either adapt to the demands of the current generation of neoliberals who want schools to be practical, measurable, and career-focused, or it will double down on the humanities and perhaps be one of the last places where intellectualism can exist for its own sake. Of course, this might be a false dichotomy. It might be possible to do both. Some recent grumblings about the lack of tech schools in America make me optimistic for a future where students are given choice. But I will forever remain a proponent of the value of a liberal arts education.
No matter what, though, the question of what students should learn and why they should learn it will remain.
I’ll close with a thought. I’ve always found it slightly annoying that we call what happens in school “work.” We aren’t working: we’re learning. But I think “work” is not an accidental term and I don’t think about it as cynicaly as I used to. Because the hard truth is that real learning is work. Real learning is hard. Real learning is frustrating, slow, tedious, obnoxious, cumbersome, messy. But it’s also necessary and it simply isn’t happening where it ought to be. There are various factors at play that explain this, many of them outside an educator’s control. Yet, as educators, one thing we certainly can do, instead of trying to “make learning fun,” is make learning learning by embracing and loving, and teaching our students to embrace and love, the struggle. We also should stop devaluing intellectualism by trying our absolute best to connect academic subjects to labor. These connections are anecdotal, tenuous, and contrived, and kids know it.
Perhaps a big part of the issue is that schools and classrooms are run by people who tend to have a natural inclination and respect for the entire learning process. This sounds like a good thing. But the hidden sad truth is that it’s quite rare for a child whom schools have failed — whom schools have lied to, whom schools diagnosed, over- or-under accommodated, and pushed through — to grow up and become a teacher. This perpetuates the cycle and it’s why the disconnect between students who struggle and their teachers isn’t closing. The problem is that most teachers were “good students,” which is really just a way of saying they found it easy to navigate a system designed for them. The system is not designed to suit everybody.
In the end, by the time a student asks why they must learn something difficult, it may be too late. People who don’t work in the classroom, especially in the upper grades, can’t experience the deep, deflated, disenchanting sadness that comes with the knowledge that most of your students view the lessons you stayed up all night planning as worthless to them and whatever they imagine the “real world” to be. It’s even sadder if you start to think about why there even exists this line between the “real world” and whatever world high school students live in now. What is so “unreal” about school?
Here’s some reassurance. Abstract math, science, history, and English are not worthless. In fact, the very reason our students tend to think reading poems or solving physics problems is worthless — namely, that it has no immediate and obvious connection to material payoff — is the precise reason these things have value. Knowledge for its own sake is a healthy escape from a society that demands, in one way or another, that everything has a price tag. Learning is hard work, but this is the very fact that makes it worth anything at all.
