Are We Educating Children or Preparing Them for the System? A Teacher Explains
The first time a student asked me “Is this going to be on the test?” I laughed a little. It was seventh-grade science, and I’d just set up a plastic bottle with vinegar and baking soda to show a chemical reaction. The kids were making predictions. Marcus raised his hand before I could even pour the vinegar. “But is this going to be on the test?” I said no, probably not. He nodded, closed his notebook, and spent the rest of the demonstration drawing a soccer field.
I didn’t realize then that Marcus was asking a much bigger question. He wasn’t being lazy. He was asking what counted in that room, what his effort would buy him. And I gave him the wrong answer in one word: no.
We talk a lot in education about curiosity and wonder. Those are pretty words. But the daily reality in most classrooms runs on grading periods, due dates, and reading levels. We mean well. We write standards and rubrics. We tell kids to show their work, and then we grade the work they show. Over time, the message gets consistent: the assignment matters more than the question. The grade matters more than the idea. The system rewards completion, not thinking.
Kids are not confused about this. They figure it out fast.
I see it in my own daughter too. Ellie is nine. She loves animals and will flip through nature books for hours on her own. But when she brings home a worksheet on habitats, she doesn’t think about habitats. She thinks about the rubric. “Does the drawing need colors or is pencil okay?” “How many sentences is a full sentence?” She’s not being difficult. She’s just been trained, like most kids her age, to scan for expectations and meet them exactly. In her world, that’s what school is.
And I’ve become part of that training. That’s the uncomfortable part. I hand out the worksheet. I remind them about margins and neatness. I wrote “double-space” on the board. I use the scanner too.
A few weeks ago I tried something small. I gave my eighth graders a prompt with no format. Just a question in bold at the top of a blank page: “What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned this year? Explain why.”
The response was panic. “Do we have to write an essay?” one asked. “How many paragraphs?” “Will it count?” I said it wouldn’t be graded, that I’d just read them to see what they thought. It got quiet. Several kids stared at the blank page for a long time. A few wrote paragraphs. Some wrote three sentences. One girl wrote, “Why are you asking this now? It’s May.” She had a point.
That class period felt different. Less efficient. There was no task to finish in twenty minutes. We were just sitting with a question. Some kids struggled with that. They’ve had ten years of tasks.
So now I have a small ritual. Every Friday, for the last ten minutes, the kids write down one thing they’re genuinely curious about. Not a research question, not a thesis, just a real question. They don’t have to turn it in. They can keep it, or they can drop it in a jar by the door. Sometimes I read a few aloud, anonymously.
Some are funny: “Why do dogs circle before lying down?” Some are heavy: “Why do people pretend not to be sad?” Some are unsettling: “If everyone has to be here, why is it called a choice?”
I don’t have good answers to most of them. That’s not the point. For ten minutes, curiosity has no format. No due date. No rubric. It doesn’t have to be impressive. It just exists.
It’s not a solution. Fridays don’t undo the other four days. Ellie still asks about colors and sentence counts. Marcus probably checks his grade before he checks his learning. I still grade essays and put checkmarks in a gradebook that feels heavier every year.
But I’ve changed a few small things at home too. When Ellie asks me, “Is this for a grade?” I try to ask her back: “What do you think the point of it is?” Usually she knows. Sometimes she shrugs. But the question interrupts the reflex. It nudges her to think about why she’s doing something, not what she’ll get for it.
I also ask one question before she starts homework. Not “what do you have to do?” but “what part of this is interesting to you?” Sometimes she says “nothing.” That’s fine. Occasionally she’ll say, “Actually, this part is kind of cool.” Those moments can’t be scheduled, and they’re rare. But they’re real.
I don’t know how to fix the larger machine. I don’t know how to make a grading system that values thinking without sorting kids, or how to meet district benchmarks and leave room for real questions on the same Thursday. Maybe we can’t fully stop preparing kids for the system, because the system is real and they’ll have to live in it.
But I’m starting to think the real question is smaller than the one in the title. It’s not “are we educating or preparing?” Maybe it’s: are we willing to sit, once in a while, with a question that doesn’t have an answer? Can the worksheet wait for ten minutes?
The jar by the door is filling up. I don’t know what I’ll do with those questions yet. But they’re there. The kids wrote them because they had a hunch someone would read them.
I think that’s a start.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Are We Educating Children or Preparing Them for the System