The Reasons School is Bad for Children

The concept of school appeared centuries ago in all ancient countries. For years, most people believe that schooling is inevitable for any human being. Nevertheless, there is an opinion that even though school might be an essential part of society, it is, surprisingly, harmful for children. From my point of view, school, to some extents, is not good for children’s growth. The first impairment school causes to children is decrease in their creativity.

According to Holt (1969), before going to school, children are all curious and confident in learning. They wonder everything that happens around them and actively ask people to explain to them. However, when children go to school, they have to learn what have already been scheduled and planned, which might not be what they truly want or need to learn. Studying becomes a spoon-feeding process. The activeness that children had toward exploring the world may gradually disappear. A recent study also found that “the more a student values creativity and expresses creative behaviors, the greater the discrepancy between their creative expression at school and outside of school”. Creative children are likely to show more creativity anywhere else rather than school, where they must follow a number of rules. This means that school is not a suitable environment to nurture children’s creativity. School not only decreases the activeness of children when finding new information, but also, is not an ideal environment to nourish their natural creativity. Secondly, the teach-and-test method in school may engender erroneous learning method and decrease study motivation. Gray (2013) claims that students know grades attained on examination papers are more important than what they actually learned at school; therefore, most students highly prefer rote learning. By rote learning, learners might pass the exam, but they will forget all knowledge right afterward as they did not have to use that knowledge. Spending time to go class and study but unable of applying learned knowledge in real life is a waste of time. Students can use this time more effectively by doing things they like, for example drawing or playing sports.

Moreover, because of test anxiety, a large number of students, both straight A and straight C students, “have lost their zest for learning by the time they reach middle school or high school”. One promising purpose of testing is to make intelligent students feel more confident, and bad-graded student to try harder in the next examination. However, based on the former research by Gray, this method has failed. People who support school believe that tests and stress can force student to learn, so that they can absorb knowledge better. However, Gray (2013) states that when people are “self-motivated, pursuing questions that are their own real questions, and goals that are their own real-life goals” they are in the best condition to obtain knowledge. Before going to school, children enjoyed learning and were able to learn by their own as they learn their mother-tongue. They wanted to communicate with other people, and they succeeded by not being forced to learn. Children do not need the pressure that school brought to be able to be excel at anything. Despite having become an age-old tradition in every country, school clearly does not help students to become better people. Perhaps this is high time that school changed its system to help student develop their nature gifts in their own way.