Why do Students Hate School?

By the Editorial Board of the Revolutionary Student Union

Across the country, countless students describe school not as a place of inspiration or growth, but as a source of boredom, stress, anxiety and depression. Everyday we are forced into a routine we have no control over, and feel stuck in the same 7-8 hour cycle of waking up early and tired, getting to a class that doesn’t interest us, taking tests that stress us out, and feeling isolated because our work takes up so much of our time.

In school, we have no choice over our learning. We are all expected to learn and behave the same, and are told that our grades and standardized tests determine our worth. We are taught that our worth is determined by how well we do in school, providing little time for interests outside of school as they are considered “unproductive”. Students who draw or read during class are told to put it away because they need to focus on their school work. School focuses mainly on “teaching” book knowledge, which is repetitive and focused on memorization rather than true understanding. You can be a great student, attend class on time, and respect teachers but still have poor grades, while a “bad” student might skip class and still excel. You can also be very knowledgeable in things outside of school, but still have terrible grades. School reflects your ability to navigate the system, not your intelligence.

Schools go through such great lengths to make sure students pay attention in class, yet they often teach us only half-truths or lies entirely. We are told to only trust “unbiased sources” like the media, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), whitehouse.gov, etc. Ignoring that the government and media themselves have their own biases! In the school system’s effort to encourage kids to “critically think” they act as if there is no such thing as truth, and there’s two valid sides to every issue. For example, kids are told to argue who benefited more: the enslaved person or the master, the colonizer or the Indigenous, etc. School treats these real issues as debatable and unsolvable problems to obscure the causes and cures to them. In reality, there is a very clear answer, and this format only allows hateful and incorrect ideas to spread.

On top of this, students are tired of the expectations that the school system pushes onto us. Within schools, there are high levels of competition, with the only reason to learn being the threat of failure and the desire to “beat” other kids by being “smarter” than them. We are given excessive amounts of homework which doesn’t value our time outside of school, and mirrors the corrupt world we’re about to enter outside of school where our employers don’t value our time either. 

As part of the future expectation, we are told that our life revolves around the job we’ll get. If we do happen to find time for a hobby we like, we are told that we have to make it our career and make money from it. And when kids get tired of this and skip school, they may be mailed a “truancy letter,” meaning that by not attending school you have broken the law and might end up in court, be fined, or spend time in jail.

Why Was the School System Created?

The American school system started off small, and its purpose was to educate the kids of rich people about Christianity and the basics of math, reading, and writing while instilling obedience into children, oftentimes through force and abuse. Looking at the early school system, it is obvious how school was used as a tool of class and racial oppression. Black and Indigenous people were deprived of education and enslaved, while poor white children received terrible education and often had to work, women were barely educated in anything besides housework, while rich white boys got a “good education.”

Residential/boarding schools were established in the US and Canada to erase Indigenous heritage by forcing children to learn English and adopt American customs. These schools took hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes. Nearly 1,000 children died, and 150,000+  suffered severe abuse. Mass graves are still being discovered to this day outside of these schools.

School was created solely for the purpose of benefiting the rich. Rich factory owners contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the early education system so it could be modeled after their factories with strict rules and train up the next generation of workers. While millions of poor children had to attend these shitty schools designed to give the bare minimum of education to most children. Simultaneously private schools existed to train the children of the rich to be the bosses and managers of those same factories. This begs the question, what is the purpose of the education system today?

How is Modern School Different

Our school system remains unchanged since its founding. Today, school exists for the same reason that it did back then: it exists because there are two classes in society, the working class and the ruling class. The ruling class wants their children to have high-paying jobs (managers, CEOs, lawyers, doctors, etc.). They send their children to fancy, private schools where they are trained to enter these jobs which control society. Poor children are sent to public schools, and since schools are funded by income taxes, they receive a worse education, and end up stuck in a cycle of poverty. Due to America’s history of segregation, children attending poorer schools are disproportionately Black and Brown. 46% of Black kids and 44% of Hispanic kids attend high-poverty schools compared to only 8% of white kids. 

 In school, we are also not taught how to better our daily lives. We currently live under a system called Capitalism, where a few rich people/companies control everything and profit off of everyone else. We are taught that if we “work hard”, we can be lucky enough to exploit our peers too! Even if people excel in school and get a “good job”, this doesn’t change the fact that this system is rotten and based on exploiting others. Rather than playing into the system by “working hard” we should fight back against it.

Inequality in schools

Education in America as a whole is extremely underfunded, but that underfunding is not shared equally. In the US schools are funded by income taxes. Schools in whiter, higher-income areas have much more funding when compared to Black and Brown schools in working class areas. In 2018, high-poverty districts raised $2,710 less revenue per student than the wealthiest school districts. Schools in impoverished areas must spend around $18,231 per student for them to succeed, but these schools can only spend a little over $13,000.  In comparison, the richest districts require only $8,313 per student but instead go over that amount by spending $10,239 per student. Added up, impoverished schools receive millions of dollars less in funding than schools in high-income, white areas. This divide has only increased since COVID-19 which hit the working class the hardest.

Lack of funding impacts student’s education, ability to go to college, and options for in-school extracurriculars.  Money for music, sports, and after-school programs is lacking in low-income schools. When students are not given these opportunities, involvement in crime and gangs becomes more likely. Lower-income students have a 9% higher chance of being suspended, with these suspensions also being longer, causing them to miss long periods of “critical learning.” If school is so important, then why does our system let so many people end up suspended and in jail? Black students, in particular, receive suspensions at a much higher rate than white students, with 18% of Black boys and 10% of Black girls receiving suspensions, compared to 5% of white boys and 2% of white girls. Black low-income students are funneled through the school-to-prison pipeline, sent from school suspensions to expulsions, then to juvenile detention, and eventually to prisons as adults. In prison, they are forced into slave labor, working for pennies per hour and being heavily exploited by the state and corporations. There are more Black men in prison today, than were enslaved in 1850. Capitalism is designed to make the most money, meaning that capitalists are willing to put hundreds of thousands of Black people in prison if it means it will make them more money.

The disparity in education is never gonna change under capitalism, as capitalism needs a poor, working class for the system to function. Some students get to attend college and work in big corporate jobs, while others enter working class jobs or prison. Programs that fund low-income schools can at best temporarily relieve the disparity, but it will never be a permanent solution. The school system conditions students from their earliest years to become well-educated exploiters or the exploited workers.  

How could school be different?

 School should connect book knowledge with practical and useful knowledge. In school, we sit for 7 hours a day, learning things that are disconnected from our daily lives. We aren’t taught how to grow food, drive cars, apply for jobs, work at those jobs, care for children, handle drug addiction and mental health issues. Every day, we are forced into this boring, repetitive routine that doesn’t improve most of our lives. School could be much more democratic than it is right now. We should have a direct say in our curriculum; we should be able to tell our teachers when they do something wrong and work together to figure out how to correct it. Instead, the curriculum is often not even set by our teachers but by state officials, and we don’t have a say in what we are taught. When our teachers are unnecessarily harsh or give us too much homework, there’s no way for us to critique them and explain what they’ve done wrong. Teachers and students shouldn’t be at odds with each other, but rather we should be working together to continuously improve our education system.

Opposed to this, there have been times in which school existed under different systems and was entirely different. The opposite of capitalism is socialism (a system in which instead of society being controlled by a small minority of bosses, society is controlled by the workers and the majority of society). Under socialist education systems, students went to factories to learn practical skills from workers. Students were able to critique their teachers, have school newspapers saying what their school could do better, and democratically run their school alongside their teachers. Groups of students would go to other schools to observe how they were ran, and come back to their school with the lessons to improve it. 

Right now, our role as students is to get together and fight for this more democratic education and social system. As the Revolutionary Student Union, our goal is to learn from and educate students about the injustices we see in society, including the education system, and organize together to fight for change.

FOR A PEOPLE’S EDUCATION SYSTEM!

UNSHACKLE THE YOUTH!