Wounded By School

A specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology,  Boston College professor Peter Gray maintains a blog at the Psychology Today website entitled "Freedom to Learn." Since July 2008, "Freedom to Learn" has focused on children's instinctive drives to play and explore, and "ways by which we could create learning environments that optimize rather than repress them."

In his most recent post, "How Does School Wound? Kirsten Olson Has Counted Some Ways," Dr. Gray reviews Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture. Olson originally set out to document the joys of learning in school; what she found instead was an overwhelming shadow of "pain, disappointment, and cynicism," wounds still tangible years after the fact.

Wounded by School groups those wounds into seven categories—wounds of creativity, compliance, rebellion, numbness, underestimation, perfectionism, and wounds of the average. Here are some of Dr. Gray's comments...

Wounds of creativity. "Students' own passions and interests are generally ignored. Students' unique creative ways of solving problems and their outside-the-box answers to questions...are not understood...[Those] who went on to live creative lives did so despite, not because of, schooling. They had to recover or rebuild the creative spirit that had been so natural to them."

Wounds of compliance. "Students must continuously follow rules and procedures that they have no role in creating and must complete assignments that make no sense in terms of their own learning needs...To avoid getting into trouble, they learn to obey blindly, and in the process they learn to be bad citizens in a democracy."

Wounds of rebellion. "Rebellion may sometimes be a healthier response than compliance, but if it goes too far it may hurt even more than compliance...Anger toward schooling can lead to a turning away from all forms of learning. And, perhaps most tragically, the rebellion can take forms that physically harm the self and others."

Wounds of numbness. "Many of Olson's respondents described themselves as 'zoned out' or 'intellectually numb' as long as they were in school. Intellectual excitement is rarely rewarded in school, but doggedly grinding it out, doing what you are supposed to do, never missing a deadline, is."

Wounds of underestimation. "A low grade achieved in a course or set of courses can unduly discourage people from following what had been their dream...If only students knew how many great achievers in our society received poor school grades in the realm of their achievement! If only teachers knew."

Wounds of perfectionism. "Students who develop identities as high achievers may feel extraordinary pressure to continue high achievement, in everything...When grades are the measure of perfection, everything is done for the grade. In school, "perfection" and intellectual numbness are quite compatible."

Wounds of the average. "The middling student[s]...described themselves as feeling insignificant, as people who don't really matter much. In the worst cases, they developed self-identities as people who are unimportant, who do not make waves, who go along but never lead."

We highly recommend you read the full post—then check out Dr. Gray's many other insightful essays on the role of play and curiosity in learning.