Poets and Techies Alike Bored in Modern Classroom

I don’t usually quote Microsoft’s Bill Gates. I like the guy, after all, he invented this great software that I (have to) use. But he said something recently at a summit meeting of U.S. governors that rings true for writers and technoids alike.

“American high schools are obsolete," Gates told the govs. "By obsolete, I don't just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed and underfunded....By obsolete, I mean that our high schools, even when they are working exactly as designed, cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.”

He went on to say that public high schools “were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting (even ruining) the lives of millions of Americans every year."

The high schools of 50-60 years ago were designed to meet the needs of post-war corporate America. It’s a model that crams a bunch of kids into a room where a talking head yaks at them for an hour. Then the kids move on to another room and another talking head. This prepares you for a lifetime of work in cubicles and hundreds of hours of meetings with corporate drones.

Gates is mainly speaking about the training of technology-oriented young people. The same goes for creative types, too. I bet if you could compare the rates of drop-out poets with those of drop-out techies, they might be the same. These are bright kids, after, all, and we are boring them to death. We parents often laugh at the constant “I’m bored” refrain from our teens. What if it’s really true, and we don’t do anything about it?

This could also explain why kids diagnosed with ADHD have such a tough time in regular classrooms. And how many of these bored artsy and techie kids have been mistakenly labeled as ADHD?

Don’t expect any action from our fearful leaders in Washington. As Thomas Friedman writes in the April 29 New York Times: “…neither Tom DeLay nor Bill Frist called a late-night session of Congress (or even a daytime one) to discuss what Mr. Gates was saying. They were too busy pandering to those Americans who don't even believe in evolution. And the president stayed fixated on privatizing Social Security. It's no wonder that the second Bush term is shaping up as ‘The Great Waste of Time.’ “

We elected the Bill Frists of the world, educated people who have to dumb down their messages so they don’t get avalanches of angry e-mails from the country’s Know-Nothings who are products of the same education system Gates rails about. Meanwhile, school administrators keep inventing more tests for more students to take to measure knowledge that has been irrelevant for 50 years. The kids, it appears, aren’t all right. And we adults have only ourselves to blame.

--Michael Shay, April 30, 2005