I read an interesting book by Denise Clark Pope over the weekend, Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students. Denise began with an interesting premise; What do our students think about our education system?  Interestingly, according to Denise, not much has been done to ask students their opinion.

So Denise went to one of the “best” schools in California, Faircrest High, and asked the teachers and administrators who she should interview.  They lead her to 5 “model” students, Kevin, Eve, Michelle, Teresa, and Berto that Denise ended up following for a year .

An A grade does not necessarily mean that the student retained or even understood the concepts… One of the students basically said this – “Once I took an exam, most of the facts I memorized, I  emptied them from my brain.”

Eve admitted that any content area knowledge she gained along the way was largely incidental.

It seems that there is a contract that exists among students, teachers and society.  Kevin describes it this way; “People don’t go to school to learn. They go to get good grades which brings them to college, which brings them the high paying job, which brings them happiness, so they think.  But basically, grades is where it’s at.”

I have worked with, employed, and associated with many products of school systems that were similar to the school that Denise visited, and I have seen firsthand how they have been betrayed by this contract.  They try in vain to apply the same strategies they were taught to employ in school and they come up short.  And they struggle; struggle with relationships, their health, and their careers, because you can’t memorize the answers to life.  Solving life’s greatest challenges requires critical thinking and creatively.

The happiest most successful people I’ve met are also the most resourceful.

They excel at relating the seemingly unrelated to develop solutions to new problems by assembling  resources, experiences and people that they have accumulated as assets.  Being able to do this requires exceptional communication skills, creative thinking and a resourcefulness that schools spend little to no time developing in their students.

When I first began reading the book, I thought, “Why did the author pick one of the highest performing schools? How will this be representative of our school system?”  But as a read, I realized the scariest finding of all; even though most schools do not have the graduation rates, SAT scores, and Ivy league attendees that Faircrest High does, nearly every school in America aspires to have their performance statistics and nearly every teacher desires students like , Kevin, Eve, Michelle, Teresa, and Berto.

Yet throughout the book you get to know these students and the tactics they employ successfully, to be considered “good students”.   And you learn, quite candidly that they are not and should not be proud of a lot of what they do; they each admitted to resorting to cheating, lying, physical abuse and betrayal to achieve good grades.

Keep in mind, this is a model school and these are model students.  “If only we could afford to have more schools like Faircrest”.  This is the plea nationwide.  Parents want to raise their children in communities like Faircrest and colleges recruit heavily from them.

We are in the midst of an enormous financial crisis created by the best graduates of the Faircrest Highs and Faircrest U’s of America.  Our education system is disassociating our children from themselves, so that they can grow to be disassociated adults who make short term choices without regard to long term consequences.  And who, increasingly are turning to their government to create more laws, programs and oversight to reconnect us.