Are We Educating Our Children, or Just Preparing Them for the System?
The worksheet sat between us on the kitchen table, a small piece of white paper with a row of problems and a strict instruction: “Show your work using equal groups.” My daughter was nine at the time, and she was getting upset because her circles weren’t round enough.
The problem was 24 divided by 3. She knew the answer. She had known the answer before she even picked up her pencil. But the worksheet didn’t just want the answer. It wanted a drawing of 24 dots separated into three circles, neatly arranged and labelled. She had redrawn it four times. Each version was “too messy.” Her hand was getting tired, and the corners of her mouth were starting to pull down into that particular frown she gets right before tears.
“I hate maths,” she said.
That might not sound like a dramatic sentence, but coming from a kid who liked numbers, who liked figuring out how many snacks she could buy with a five-pound note, who liked the trick of multiplication being repeated addition, it stopped me. What she hated wasn’t the maths. She hated being asked to prove something she already understood, in a way that someone else had decided was acceptable.
She looked up at me. “Can you do the drawing for me?”
I almost did. I can draw a neat enough circle, and I knew exactly what the teacher wanted to see. It would have taken two minutes. Then she would be calm, dinner would get made, the worksheet would go back into the bag, and the evening could continue. But something stopped me.
“Let’s look at what you’re showing,” I said, pointing at her last attempt. “You’ve got three groups there. How many in each group?”
She counted the dots, even though she didn’t need to. “Eight.”
“So you do understand.”
“The teacher won’t think so,” she said. “The circles are wonky.”
That was the moment I noticed the line we walk. We say we want to educate children, to give them the tools to think and question and understand. But a lot of the actual machinery of school is built around a different outcome. The machinery is built to produce work that is tidy, submitted on time, and formatted correctly. Those things have a purpose. They are part of living in a society. But they are not the same as thinking, and they are not the same as learning.
I have been on both sides of this. I have been the parent holding a pencil, watching a child’s confidence drain away over a drawing that had nothing to do with division. And I have been the teacher looking at a pile of homework, knowing I would probably mark the neatest ones more favourably, not out of fairness but out of tiredness. I understand the system. The system needs consistency. It needs to be able to compare one piece of work with another. But as a parent sitting at the kitchen table, the system felt like a wall between my daughter and the actual skill she was supposed to be developing.
This is not just about maths worksheets. It is about every small way we tell children that performance matters more than understanding. The child who writes a long, rambling story but hides a clever idea in the middle. The child who asks an awkward question during circle time that isn’t on the lesson plan. The child who knows the answer but can’t show the “strategy” in the approved format. We talk about school as a place where children are prepared for life. But life is not a rubric. It is full of wonky circles and partially formed thoughts.
The next morning, I sent a message to the maths teacher. It took me an embarrassingly long time to write, because I didn’t want to sound like a difficult parent. Eventually I said something like: “She knows her times tables and can divide without the model. The visual drawing is making her say she hates maths. Can we let her try a few problems without the circles for a while?”
The teacher replied surprisingly quickly. “Of course. Just write ‘completed without visual model’ at the top of the sheet. We can catch up with the drawing when it’s not causing so much frustration.”
I felt relief, and also annoyance at myself. I had been ready to accept the system as unchangeable. A ten-minute message had changed the situation for my daughter. It wasn’t a grand rebellion. It was just a request for a small adjustment. But how many parents don’t send the message because we are told not to question the homework? How many children are left to believe they are bad at a subject when really they are just bad at a particular way of showing what they know?
There is a difference between teaching children to work within a system and teaching them that the system is the point. We need both, I think. We need children to learn how to follow instructions, meet deadlines, and produce work that other people can read. Those are real skills. But when that becomes the entire purpose of education, something gets quietly lost. We start to raise children who are excellent at compliance and less sure about curiosity. We raise children who ask “Will this be on the test?” far sooner than they should.
At the same time, I don’t want to pretend there is a clean answer. My daughter still draws the circles. The teacher’s flexibility only goes so far; there are other worksheets, other terms, other teachers with different expectations. Some nights she comes home satisfied. Some nights she says she hates school. It doesn’t line up neatly.
What I have learned to do is separate the two things out loud. When she gets a comment about presentation or neatness, I talk about it as a “school skill” rather than a reflection of her understanding. I say things like: “The teacher needs to see that you can present your thoughts in a certain order. That is a useful skill to have, so we’ll practise it. But it’s not the same as knowing the answer.” I don’t say this with too much weight. I say it while packing her lunchbox or clearing the table. I say it lightly enough that she can ignore it if she wants to.
And I try to make sure that at home, we sometimes do maths in the opposite way. I give her problems with no format at all. “Here is a bag of 24 sweets. I want to split them between three people. Do whatever you need to do.” She counts them out, or divides them, or guesses and checks. No drawings. No labels. Just the answer, and a quick chat about how she got there. That conversation is worth more than all the worksheets, because that is where the actual understanding lives.
So I have spent a long time with that question. Are we educating children, or are we preparing them for a system? I don’t think it is one or the other. We are doing both, and we have to do both. A child who never learns to sit in a classroom or hand in work on time will struggle later. But a child who only learns to sit in a classroom and hand in work on time will struggle in everything else.
The more honest question is about proportions. How much of a child’s school day is spent learning how to think, and how much is spent learning how to comply? I think we skew too far towards compliance. I see it in the way we grade presentation in subjects where it doesn’t matter. I see it in the way children are praised for sitting still and finishing first. I see it in the way my daughter almost cried over a circle that didn’t look perfect, at the age of nine.
So we make the small adjustments we can. I send the messages. I talk about the difference between the work and the understanding. I let her do maths without the model when the model is getting in the way. None of this solves the larger problem. The system is still there, and it won’t change quickly. But I want her to know, as early as possible, that the system is a set of conventions we navigate, not a measure of her mind.
We will keep drawing the circles when needed. Some days they will be tidy. Some days they will be wonky. The page goes into the school bag either way, and the division problem gets solved either way. The real question isn’t whether the circles are neat when she hands the paper in. It’s whether she still knows what the answer means after the paper comes back with a star on it.
I don’t fully know the answer to that yet. I’m still watching.
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