Why The Traditional Education System Was Faulty From The Start: A Teacher Mom’s Practical Take
I’m sitting at my kitchen table at 4:17 p.m., half-grading my 4th grade students’ vocabulary quizzes, half-watching my 10-year-old son Jax stare at his 5th grade math worksheet. There’s a half-eaten peanut butter cracker on the edge of his paper, and a smudge of blue crayon across the top of the fraction problems. After 22 minutes of staring, he crumples the worksheet into a ball and hurls it at the recycling bin. “I got the first three right,” he says. “Why do I have to do 22 more?”
That’s when the old fact from my college education class popped into my head, the one I’d filed away as a boring history note for 12 years. The public education system we use wasn’t built to help every kid grow into their own interests or pace. It was built in the 1800s to train factory workers: show up on time, stay in line, do the same repetitive task exactly as you’re told, don’t ask questions. It was faulty from the start, because its core goal was never to meet kids where they are. It was to standardize them.
I’d seen this play out in my classroom a hundred times before it hit home with my own kid. Last month, I sat across from Mia’s mom during parent-teacher conferences, our knees bumping the small kid-sized table with a dried glitter glue stain in the corner. Mia is one of the most creative kids I’ve ever taught—she writes 10-page stories about a family of foxes who run a bakery in her free time, and her illustrations are good enough to hang on my fridge. But she’s failing spelling. She spells words the way they sound to her, instead of memorizing the 10 random list words we’re required to give each week. “She says she’s bad at writing now,” Mia’s mom told me, twisting her coffee cup between her hands. “She won’t even write her fox stories anymore.”
That’s the flaw, right? The system assumes every kid will learn the same skill at the same time in the same way, and if they don’t, they’re the problem. Not the system. Mia can write a full, cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end—something most 3rd graders struggle with. But because she can’t memorize 10 unrelated spelling words in a week, she’s labeled as behind.
The good news is you don’t have to quit your job and homeschool to work around this. I’ve been making small, low-effort changes both at home and in my classroom that don’t require overhauling anything, just shifting what we prioritize.
When Jax complains about repetitive homework, we do this: I have him do 5 problems to show me he gets the concept. If he gets all 5 right, he’s done. I write a quick note to his teacher that says “Jax demonstrated mastery with 5 problems, used the extra 20 minutes for his rocket build” and that’s it. Most teachers I know don’t even want to grade 25 of the same problem—they’re just following the system too. That extra 20 minutes a night adds up to 3 hours a month Jax gets to spend on something he actually cares about, instead of spinning his wheels on work that doesn’t teach him anything new.
For Mia, we changed one small thing: instead of making her practice 10 random list words, we pull 5 words she actually misspelled in her fox stories. She practices those 5 words all week, and that’s her spelling requirement. I checked with the administration, and it still meets the state’s skill standard—she’s just practicing words that matter to her, instead of words picked out of a textbook by someone who’s never met her. Last week she brought in a new 12-page fox story, so that’s working so far.
In my own classroom, I stopped forcing all kids to read the same assigned “grade-level” novel for independent reading. A few years back, I had a student named Leo who would do anything to get out of reading. He’d forget his book, he’d go to the nurse 10 times a period, he’d fail every reading quiz. Then I found a dinosaur encyclopedia in his backpack he was reading under his desk. I’d made him stick to the assigned book before that, but that day I told him he could count the encyclopedia for his reading credit. I also started letting kids write about any topic they wanted, as long as they hit the skill we were working on—if we were practicing persuasive writing, he could write about why T-Rex was the best predator instead of why we should reduce plastic use, same skill. That kid just DM’d me last month, he’s starting his junior year studying paleontology at a state university. He said he still remembers when I let him stop reading that boring assigned book and just read what he cared about.
None of this fixes the root problem. The system is still built on that old faulty foundation, and it’s going to take a lot more than small changes from individual parents and teachers to rework it entirely. Jax still gets assigned too much repetitive homework some weeks, and I still have to fight to adjust assignments for kids once a semester. Mia’s spelling tests are still a little clunky, and some years the administration pushes back on letting kids pick their own topics.
Last weekend, Jax brought his finished rocket to the county science fair. It took him three weeks of after-school work to get it right, and it ended up taking third place in the design category. He came home with a blue ribbon and a bag of candy from the contest, and immediately started planning next year’s bigger, faster rocket. The system isn’t ever going to be perfect; it was broken from the start when it decided all kids should fit the same mold. But we don’t have to wait for the system to change to give our kids a little more space to be themselves, one small adjustment at a time.
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