Why So Many Kids Are Learning to Hate School (And What We Can Do About It)
My daughter came home last Tuesday with a math worksheet that had forty identical long-division problems on it. She was eight. She sat at the kitchen table and stared at the paper for ten minutes before asking, “Do I have to do all of these?”
I looked at the sheet. Problem after problem after problem, same steps, same layout, no story, no puzzle, no reason to do any of them beyond finishing. I told her to do ten and write a note to her teacher saying she understood the concept. She looked relieved, but also confused. “Will I get in trouble?”
She did the ten. The teacher never mentioned the note.
That moment has stuck with me because it wasn’t dramatic. Nobody was yelling. No tears were shed. But something got communicated anyway: that school is a place where you prove what you know by obediently repeating it, and the only thing that matters is completion.
I used to believe the school system was broken in a way that could be fixed. That a new principal, a better curriculum, more funding, or the right parent volunteers would turn it around. But the more time I spend in classrooms, the harder it is to picture what “fixed” would even look like. The system isn’t failing by accident. It’s working exactly how it was designed to work: process the largest number of kids with the least amount of friction.
My cousin teaches fifth grade in a district that’s rated “excellent” on every public dashboard. When I visited her classroom, I saw something that looked less like learning and more like herding. She had thirty-one kids, all at different reading levels, and a mandated curriculum packet that was forty pages thick. She told me, in the five seconds she had before the next transition, that she’d have to stretch that packet out for six days because that’s what the pacing guide said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because the district bought the program, and the program has pacing guides, and the assistant superintendent checks if we’re on the right page,” she said. She wasn’t angry. She just sounded tired.
The kids didn’t look angry either. They looked checked out. Some were copying answers from each other. A few were daydreaming. One boy was drawing tiny spaceships in the margin. Nobody was misbehaving. Nobody was learning much either.
Parents notice this, but we don’t know what to do with it. We see our kids coming home worn out and bored, and we feel guilty for being relieved when they’re quiet. We tell ourselves that “school isn’t supposed to be fun” because that’s what we were told. But there’s a difference between a skill being hard and a skill being meaningless.
The thing that’s changed is not the teachers. Most teachers I talk to are working harder than ever. The thing that’s changed is the architecture around them. When test scores dropped in the early 2000s, the response was to make schools more accountable. But the accountability had a side effect: it rewarded schools for narrowing what they taught. Literature became passages with multiple-choice questions. Math became problem sets that look exactly like what appears on the state test. Social studies, art, and music got squeezed into an enrichment rotation that happens once a week, if the schedule holds.
A child’s brain, meanwhile, is still the same wet, messy, curious organ it always was. It wants to know why. It wants to build things and break things and ask ridiculous questions. The school system spends most of its energy suppressing those impulses because they’re inefficient.
I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy. I’m saying there’s a trade-off, and nobody voted on it. The trade was this: acceptable test performance in exchange for intellectual life. And the schools got better at the first and worse at the second, and here we all are.
Recently, I started helping my son with his eighth-grade science homework. The assignment was to read a textbook chapter and answer twenty-two questions. He knew all the answers already because they were written in the text. His job was to find them and copy them into complete sentences. When I asked him what he’d learned, he said, “I don’t know. I just need to finish.”
I tried something different. I asked him to pick one question from the list and explain to me, out loud, why the answer made sense. He could do it. He just wasn’t in the habit of thinking that way. The homework itself was so shallow that it had trained him to scan for keywords. His ability to reason was intact. The assignment just never asked him to use it.
That gave me a small idea. Not a policy idea. Not a systemic fix. Just a practical one.
What if parents stopped treating homework like a non-negotiable word from above? What if we told our kids, “Do enough to show you understand this, and then stop?” Maybe that’s a radical idea, but think about it: a worksheet that would take forty minutes to complete proves nothing more than one that takes ten. The extra thirty minutes don’t deepen understanding. They just generate more compliance.
I know teachers don’t want thirty-one custom homework assignments. They want a manageable life. So the trick is to keep it low-friction. When something feels repetitive, just reduce it. Ten math problems instead of forty. One paragraph instead of five. A note that says, “She showed me she can do this, and I didn’t want to burn her out on repetition.” I’ve done this for years now. No teacher has ever complained. A few have even thanked me.
The bigger move is to shift the conversation with your child away from completion and toward comprehension. When they say, “I’m done,” ask, “What did you make?” or “What surprised you?” or “Can you teach me how to do that?” These questions take about a minute, but they reframe what schoolwork is for. They suggest that the goal is understanding, not finishing.
I don’t think I can fix the school system. I can’t design a better curriculum or make testing less strange. But I can change what happens at my own kitchen table.
The last few months, I’ve stopped buying the workbooks. Instead, I’ve been reading the same book as my daughter and arguing about the ending with her at breakfast. My son and I have been building a chicken coop in the backyard. He learned more about load-bearing geometry in one afternoon than he has in two years of geometry class, because the roof actually had to hold weight.
I’m not suggesting every parent build a chicken coop. I’m suggesting we pay attention to where learning actually happens. It usually doesn’t happen in rows of identical problems. It happens when someone is confused enough to need help and motivated enough to ask for it.
The school system is probably going to keep getting more standardized for a while. That’s the direction we’re heading. But in the meantime, I don’t have to let that standardization define what my children believe learning is.
We’re still figuring it out. Some days I help them finish their homework. Other days I tell them to put the worksheet away and go outside. I try to read the room. My daughter still asks for reassurance before she deviates from an assignment. My son still asks why he has to learn things he’ll never use. I don’t have especially good answers.
But I do have one thing that the school system can’t take away: the conversation. And I’m going to keep having it.
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