School is Bad for Children: How The Disadvantages of Schooling Outweigh Its Benefits

It is a long lasting tradition that we take our children to school. Education keeps evolving day by day. The advantages of schooling are undeniable as an educated person has the power to solve the world’s problems. With knowledge, human beings have come so far, from inventing the light bulb to space travel. However, school also has its downsides. Mental health issues, for example, have never got such attention. In the article “College and Teen Suicide Statistics”, suicides among teenage girls doubled from 2007 to 2015. Therefore, we should bear in mind the thought of questioning the benefits of traditional school. In my opinion, while there are many advantages of schooling, its disadvantages outweigh its benefits. The first disadvantage of schooling is that the natural learning ability of the child is gradually eliminated. Children at school become passive in learning new things. The process of learning is like a feast where teachers serve the knowledge food to students. During this process, instead of finding the ingredients or cooking, children have other people do that for them.

In other words, no exploration, no brainstorming when learning, they just learn by heart even without truly understanding the things that people tell them to remember in order to be able to do tests. John Holt (1969) indicates, “He comes to feel that learning is a passive process, something that someone else does to you, instead of something you do for yourself”. Children are not willing to do something unless we show them that it needs to be done, and school continues telling them how it should be done, that there are no other ways to do things than this. This situation leads to a terrible consequence, to some points, that children will lose their interest in learning something new, or maybe worse, children will not be able to acquire necessary skills to be successful in life. The next drawback of schooling is that most of the schools tend to lack equal cerebral hemispheres development; therefore, children seldom have the opportunities to develop fully. As stated by Morrin (2012), Maths and Languages are considered more valuable than Music and Art, “life without writers, musicians, actors, artists or dancers would be grim. Yet these are the subjects given least importance, if they’re even available, in school.” Albert Einstein once said “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.” Nevertheless, today we evaluate one’s ability only by one kind of intelligence which is IQ. According to Howard Gardner multiple intelligences theory, there are eight kinds of intelligence. It is likely to be unfair that children with special non-academic talents are considered airheads. If this idea of education keeps carrying on, “We could end up with a world full of scholars who have never had a job” (Morrin, 2012). This situation will not benefit the children as well as the society as “the diversity of talents” is not highly appreciated at school. It is obvious that school provides children with knowledge about the world and motivates learners to learn by giving goals, tasks and assignments. Tests are invented to measure the progress that the students have made.

Children do homework so that they understand more about the subjects and remember all the necessary knowledge. However, in some cases, these measurements put so much pressure on children. Too much homework and high expectation on the outcome of the test score may do more harm to children than we usually notice. Therefore, school might not be as advantageous for children as our expectation. In the end, although school actually has some benefits upon children, a great deal of research has pointed out its disadvantages. School can slowly discard children’s learning ability and fail to value children’s talents. In order to change, we need to take immediate actions to encourage children to learn confidently and to challenge themselves to grow into the people that they desire.