Are we educating children or just preparing them for the system? A teacher’s perspective
The first time I noticed it was during a science lesson on plant growth. The children had planted bean seeds in plastic cups two weeks earlier, and they were supposed to be measuring them daily. Most of them were doing it, but one boy, Leo, had a notebook full of scribbled observations that didn’t match the actual plants at all. When I crouched beside him and asked why his measurements were so different, he looked at me honestly and said, “I didn’t know what to write, so I wrote what I thought you wanted to see.”
He wasn’t being lazy. He was being strategic. He’d learned, at eight years old, that the point of schoolwork is to produce the correct-looking answer, not to actually understand what’s happening. And honestly, I couldn’t blame him. I’d spent the first few months of that school year handing out worksheets with clearly defined boxes, checking off vocab words, and grading work based on neatness as much as accuracy. I was doing exactly what the system asked of me, and he was adapting to it faster than I was.
The strange thing is that most teachers I know didn’t go into education to sort children into categories. They went in because they liked watching kids figure things out. But somewhere between the pacing guide and the standardized test prep, that getting students to figure things out turns into getting students to fill in the right bubbles. It happens gradually, and then it becomes the default. You start hearing yourself say things like “We don’t have time for that” and “That won’t be on the test,” and you realize you’ve become a completely different kind of adult than the one you imagined when you chose this profession.
What I’ve come to see, watching my own two kids go through school while I teach other people’s kids, is that the question “Are we educating children or preparing them for a system?” isn’t a philosophical one. It’s a practical one that plays out in small daily decisions. Like when my daughter comes home with a spelling list and I have to decide whether to drill her on the words or ask her to write me a note about her day. The note will have misspellings. The drill will produce a perfect Friday quiz score. One of those feels like learning. The other feels like a performance.
The system doesn’t ask for understanding. It asks for compliance demonstrated in measurable ways. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s just that you can’t put a number on genuine curiosity, so schools measure what they can. Reading levels, math fluency scores, homework completion rates. These are all real things, but they’re proxies, not the thing itself. A child can score high on a reading test and still hate books. A child can finish algebra homework and still have no idea why the solution works. We’ve all seen that happen. We’ve all been that child.
The problem becomes visible in moments like Leo’s bean plant notebook. He’d figured out the hidden curriculum. The real assignment wasn’t measuring anything. The real assignment was producing a document that looked like measurement, so that the teacher could check a box saying the assignment was done. He’d cracked the code. And he wasn’t wrong about what the code was.
So what can we actually do about this as parents and teachers? Not in some ideal world where we abandon all standards, but in the real world where report cards go home in June and kids need to pass yearly assessments?
I think it starts with being honest about which parts of school are for the system and which parts are for the child. When my daughter practices handwriting, for example, I don’t pretend it’s fun. I tell her, “Some people think neat writing matters because their brains work that way, and you need to be able to show them what you know.” That’s not inspiring, but it’s true. It helps her see that some tasks are just gatekeeping. They exist to prove you can meet someone else’s standard. That’s not education in the deep sense, but it is a life skill to know how to do things that don’t feel meaningful.
The more important thing is carving out space where actual learning can happen without being graded. In my classroom, I started doing what I call “messy notes” once a week. After a lesson, kids get five minutes to write any question they still have, or a drawing of what they didn’t understand, or just “I’m confused” with a frowny face. They turn them in unsigned, and I read them all. I never grade this. I just use it to figure out what I need to re-teach in a different way. The first time I did it, a quiet girl who never raised her hand wrote, “Why do the leaves turn red in the fall but not all at once?” That question had nothing to do with the lesson. But it was the first real question she’d asked me all year. In the official classroom, she was invisible. In the messy notes, she was a thinker.
At home, my husband and I started a simple routine during school pickup. Instead of asking “What did you learn today?” which produces the most scripted, worthless answer on earth, we ask “What did you wonder about today?” The first week, my kids just looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. But after a while, they started offering things. My son wonders why trucks have those little wheels at the back. My daughter wonders whether ants sleep at night. None of this is graded. None of it will show up on a report card. But it tells me their minds are still alive. And that’s the thing I’m most afraid of losing.
The system wants kids to become efficient. It wants them to learn that questions with clear answers are the only safe ones. But real education teaches something closer to the opposite: that the most important questions are exactly the ones nobody has a worksheet for.
I don’t have a grand solution. I’m as caught up in the system as anyone. I still assign homework. I still prepare students for tests. My own kids will still take the same standardized exams as everyone else in their grade. But I’m more honest about it now. When I hand back a graded worksheet full of red marks, I sometimes say, “This shows me you can follow instructions. That’s a useful skill. But it doesn’t tell me anything about what you actually care about. So let’s talk about what you care about instead.” It sounds strange in a classroom. The kids laugh. Then somebody says something interesting, and we spend ten minutes following a thread that has nothing to do with the lesson plan.
That’s not much. But it’s not nothing either. It’s a small reminder that the system isn’t the only thing happening in a classroom or a kitchen table. There’s still space for real questions. There’s still room for a child to wonder why leaves turn red at different times, or why ants sleep, or what their teacher was really trying to get them to see in a bean plant.
I don’t know if Leo will figure out how to do real scientific observation this year. He might just keep telling me what he thinks I want to hear. That’s a survival instinct, and it’s hard to argue with it. But I want him to also know that somewhere out there, there’s a grown-up who’d rather hear what he actually noticed. Even if it’s messy. Especially if it’s messy.
Because that’s what educating is, I think. It’s less about filling a vessel and more about noticing that the vessel already has something moving inside it. The system would rather you measure the vessel. But you don’t have to only measure. You can also listen.
The year’s not over. We’ll see what happens with the beans.
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