Education: Why school is a nightmare

I was listening to the terrific BBC commentator Lucy Kellaway talking about helping her daughter to prepare for a school exam.

School is a nightmare.  There is nothing at work, or from work, that can cause such psychic damage as school exams, noted Kellaway. 

She said that she herself still has nightmares about school.  So do I. And my brilliant co-author Julie Coates did a study of my college class 'most outstanding memory' from Carleton College. The most outstanding memory, according to the submissions by my fellow graduates - - nightmares, recurring, still going on today, almost 40 years after graduation.  This from graduates from a top ranked college, all of whom are successful.  Nobody going in, or coming out of Carleton College, could be called an academic failure.  And yet school and college so emphasizes failure, so focuses on judgment instead of learning and motivation and encouragement, that the most outstanding memory of most college graduates is nightmares, the most prominent sign of the psychic damage Kellaway rightly identifies. 

Comments

[Suzanne]

I'd say everyone I know who went to college has the nightmare that it's final exam time and you forgot to go to class all semester.

When I've taught college classes as an adjunct prof, my students were always blown away when I told them I don't think you learn well when you're freaking out. Therefore, you don't have to stress when I give you a hard assignment (I was big on making them do strategic plans), because if you screw it up, I will flip it back to you to fix (and tell you what you need to do to fix it). Who learns from an "E"? You learn from fixing what you got wrong.

By the way, one of my students evaluation of me said, "she's tough, but she's fair." I always thought I was "easy" because I let my students have second chances (which my cohort never had as undergrads) - but that would be my bias from own academic experience, I guess.