Are We Educating Children or Preparing Them for a System? What One Teacher Sees Every Day
The question came on a Tuesday, right in the middle of a lesson on the water cycle. A ten-year-old named Maya raised her hand, and instead of asking about evaporation, she asked, “Miss, is this going to be on the test?”
I paused. The honest answer was yes. The district pacing guide had scheduled three days for this unit, and the assessment was coming up on Friday. But something in her voice stopped me. She wasn’t curious about rain or clouds. She was asking if the information was worth storing, or just worth remembering for forty-eight hours.
That’s when the real question started nagging at me: are we actually educating children, or are we just preparing them to move through a system?
I didn’t have a neat answer that day. I still don’t. But I’ve been paying attention ever since, and I’ve noticed small moments like that everywhere.
Yesterday, I watched a sixth-grader named Jonah struggle with a math worksheet. He was working on fractions, and he’d made a common mistake—multiplying denominators instead of keeping them common. His usual response, when he gets something wrong, is to look at me with a kind of lazy panic. He’s one of those kids who’s learned to worry more about the red mark than the process. So before I said anything, he flipped the page over and said, “Can I just start over? I need to get the right answer.”
I asked him, “Why does the right answer matter more than figuring out where you went wrong?”
He looked at me like I’d asked him to explain a joke. Because that’s what the system teaches, isn’t it? Get the grade, pass the test, move to the next unit. The destination matters more than the path.
At home, I see the same thing with my own two children. My daughter, Ellie, is in third grade. She brings home reading logs. She earns points for every book she finishes, and the school tracks them on a classroom chart. Last week, she brought home a book about penguins. She was excited and told me about how penguins sleep standing up. Then she said, “Dad, can you sign the log? I need to get to twenty points.”
She wasn’t asking me to listen to her read. She was asking me to process her paperwork. The love of knowing about penguins was still there, but it was already wrapped in the language of points and rewards.
I’m not blaming the school. Teachers are doing their best with the tools they have. We have pacing guides, standards, and standardized tests. We have to measure something, and so we measure what’s easy to measure. But the problem is that the measurement starts to drive everything. When you know the test is coming, you begin to teach to the test. Not because you’re a bad teacher, but because you know that a group of twenty-five kids needs to cover a certain amount of material in a certain number of days. There’s no time to let a curiosity about penguins derail the schedule.
And so what do children learn? They learn to scan for the “important” things. They learn to ask, “Do we need to know this?” They learn to treat their own questions as interruptions rather than starting points.
I remember a conversation with a parent at a conference last year. Her son, Liam, was bright but disorganized. He was failing to turn in homework assignments even though he was doing well on tests. She said, “I don’t care about the grades. I just want him to learn. But the way the school works, if he doesn’t get his work in, he gets a zero, and the zero goes into the system.”
She wasn’t asking me to excuse her son. She was asking something more uncomfortable: Why does the system care more about compliance than understanding? Why does a zero on a worksheet about angles matter more than the fact that Liam can explain why the pyramids in Egypt form triangles?
That’s what I keep circling around. We’ve built a system that rewards a very narrow kind of success. Show up on time, follow the rules, do the work, hit the deadline, get the grade. And the kids who thrive are often the ones who are already good at that kind of thing—or the ones who are anxious enough to conform. The kids who ask “why” too often, or who take longer to understand something deeply, get labeled as problems. We call them off-task, or unfocused, or behind.
I had a boy a few years ago named Theo. He hated reading assignments because he read slowly, but he loved being read to. When I read aloud, he’d ask the smartest questions. He’d wonder why the main character made a certain choice, or what would happen if a different choice had been made. But on the reading comprehension test, he scored below grade level because he ran out of time. When I brought this up to his mom, she said, “He’s never been good at tests. But he’s always thinking.”
That’s the thing that scares me most. We’re so busy sorting kids with numbers that we miss the thinking. And the thinking is the part that actually matters for life.
So how do we fight this? I don’t think we can tear down the whole system overnight. I don’t even think we should. Grades and deadlines have their place. But I think we can start changing what we ask and what we praise.
At home, you can try some small, concrete shifts. Instead of asking, “What did you learn today?” ask, “What did you ask about today?” That simple change opens a door. The child might say, “Nothing,” or they might say, “I asked whether dinosaurs could have survived if the asteroid hit differently.” Either way, you’re signaling that questions matter more than answers.
When your kid brings home a spelling list, you can spend one night breaking the spelling rules instead of memorizing them. Why is “b” silent in “thumb”? What words would be weird if we pronounced every letter? That turns a system task into a real investigation.
For homework struggles, try separating the work from the grade. Say something like, “Let me see the mistakes you made. I’m actually interested in those.” My own kids started showing me their red pen marks with a kind of pride after I framed it that way. It took a few tries, but they eventually understood that a wrong answer wasn’t shameful—it was just a clue.
In classrooms, I’ve started experimenting with a small thing. After a test, I give five minutes for each student to write down the one question they still have. It’s not graded. It’s just their question. Some write, “Why do we need to know this?” Some write, “How do we know the ancient Romans really did that?” And sometimes, we use those questions to plan our next lesson, even if it isn’t in the pacing guide. Last month, one student asked why we don’t learn about ancient Africa. That led to a three-day tangent that taught more about trade routes than the textbook ever would have.
Does it solve everything? No. The test still comes. The grades still go on the report card. Theo still struggles with timed reading. Ellie still has to complete her reading log. But the message is slowly shifting. We’re saying to our children, “The system requires certain things, but the system is not the same as learning.”
I don’t think we need to pretend we have a perfect solution. The tension is real, and it’s not going away. We live in a world that wants to measure, sort, and rank. But we also live in a world that needs people who can think, question, and adapt. Those two worlds don’t line up neatly, and that’s okay.
Last week, Maya asked another question. We were talking about how mountains form, and she asked, “If the Earth is moving all the time, why don’t we feel it?” Normally, I would have said, “Great question—now let’s get back to the worksheet.” Instead, I said, “Do you remember what happens with tectonic plates? Let’s look at that.” We spent ten minutes talking about plate movement and earthquakes. We didn’t finish the worksheet. But for ten minutes, a child was actually learning because she wanted to, not because she had to.
That’s the small victory. It doesn’t show up on a test. It doesn’t make the pacing guide. But it reminds me why I became a teacher, and why I’m in no rush to exit the system. Because as long as kids keep asking, there’s a chance to teach them something real. Even if the system never fully approves.
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