Breaking news! A nationally-representative poll of more than 1,000 teenagers finds that… students are still bored. Here are some key findings:
64% of teenagers think that school is boring
70% of teenagers say that all or most of their classmates are bored in class
Only 41% of teenagers like going to school
Only 40% of teenagers think that their homework helps them learn
30% of teenagers say that school is a waste of time
Only 19% of teenagers say that most of their classmates want to be in school
These results just confirm earlier findings. This is a system that is fundamentally BROKEN. Everyone is expressing concern about students’ chronic absenteeism. But we’re just offering them the same old boring stuff. That’s not a successful sales pitch for a student who doesn’t want to come to school, is it?
What will we do about these recent findings? Probably the same thing that we’ve done in the past: nothing. As I said in an earlier post:
The biggest indictment of our schools is not their failure to raise test scores above some politically-determined line of ‘proficiency.’ It’s that – day in and day out – they routinely ignore the fact that our children are bored, disengaged, and disempowered. We’ve known this forever, but we have yet to really care about it in a way that would drive substantive changes in practice. The disenfranchisement of our youth continues to happen in the very institutions that are allegedly preparing them to be ‘life long learners.’
Shame on us.
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The biggest indictment of our schools is not their failure to raise test scores
