Why do students hate school: The Surprising Reason Some Students Don’t Like School

The Surprising Reason Some Students Don’t Like School

The Surprising Reason Some Students Don’t Like School

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October 20, 2021
byChristopher E. Nelson

This post was originally published in August 2015, and has been updated for accuracy and relevancy in October 2021.

If you ask most k-12 students what they don’t like about school, their lists will be lengthy. While online school students won’t make the usual complaints about getting up early for long bus rides or eating cafeteria food like most kids will, their lists will typically include such items as:

• Taking tests
• Writing papers
• Mastering Subjects X, Y, or Z
• Handling stress
• Dealing with cyberbullying

But ask cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham the same question and you’ll get a much more surprising answer:

Thinking  Is Hard

According to Willingham, students dislike school because thinking is hard, effortful, and slow. As he explains in his recently revised, second edition of “Why Don’t Students Like School,” thinking requires students to:

• Retrieve information from their immediate environment and the vast factual storehouse of their long-term memory
• Combine that information in new ways in their more limited, short-term working memory
• Imagine solutions based on those new combinations

So, even though they’re naturally curious, students (and the rest of us, too!) will avoid thinking—unless the learning conditions are right.

What Are the Right Conditions for Thinking?

The proper conditions for learning are the conditions or activities that allow students to experience the pleasurable rush of solving problems—whether those problems are algebra equations or struggling to understand Shakespeare’s sonnets.

In fact, neuroscientists believe that the pleasurable rush may be the actual rush of chemicals produced by the brain’s natural reward system. Remember how it feels to get that last crossword, Sudoku, or Jeopardy answer? Well, students love that feeling of success just as much as you do.

Why Do Students Say “I Hate School?”

So, when a student hates school, Willingham says what they’re actually disliking are the conditions that rob thinking of its pleasure, such as:

Working on problems that are too easy or too difficult. 

If a problem is too easy, your student will get no pleasure from solving it. If the problem appears too difficult, your student will shut down the thought process because it seems to offer no pleasurable payoff. As in “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” the problems have to be “just right.”

Tackling problems that assume too much background knowledge.

We’ve all faced this one before, but think of it from a second-grader’s viewpoint. Asked to solve “What is 18 × 7?” in her head, she’ll need to know not only that 8 × 7 is 56 but also the procedure for doing the math. Lacking even one piece of required background knowledge, she’ll be unable to solve the problem. If this happens often enough, you’ll end up with a student who dislikes school.

Working on problems that exceed the limits of working memory.

Working memory is the limited “space” where ideas are briefly held and manipulated. It can get quickly overcrowded by “multistep instructions, lists of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long, and the application of a just-learned concept to new material (unless the concept is quite simple).”

As working memory becomes crowded, thinking becomes increasingly difficult. To put it another way:

How Parents and Learning Coaches Can Help

Collaboration is the key. As a parent or a Connections Academy® Learning Coach in a virtual school, you’re in an ideal position to know that your student becomes frustrated when assignments are too hard or bored when they’re too easy. You’ll also know when learning conditions are “just right” for giving your online student that pleasurable rush of problem-solving success.

With your help and feedback, virtual school teachers can better understand your individual student’s thought processes and help ensure the very best conditions for thinking, learning, and liking school. We hope these insights from cognitive psychology will help you support your child’s education and allow you to become the best Learning Coach you can be.

Of course, there may be other reasons your teenage student doesn’t like school. Find out how online school can help struggling teens.

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Why Don’t Students Like School? Cognitive Science Explains

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Most people in the world enjoy to constantly learn as a natural factor of living a fulfilling life. However, during the school-age years, many students have an anathema towards learning, which brings us to the question: Why don’t students like school?

There are many reasons that are inherent in the education system which makes school undesirable for many students around the world. Here, we will look at some of the reasons why students may consider school to be a negative experience, rather than a positive, uplifting and gratifying one.

Photo by Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash

Why Don’t Students Like School?

1. Conformity and Constriction

Classes are not directed toward each individual student, but rather curriculums are designed and delivered to an entire class regardless of the student’s ability, which ultimately leads to boredom and frustration.

Additionally, schools often develop a system of time restriction, which means that the teacher is expected to be at a certain point of the curriculum at a specific time with no leeway given for either struggling or advanced students.

2. Lack of Freedom

Cognitive scientist Daniel T. Wilingham published a book called Why Don’t Students Like School? In it, he shares his thesis that students don’t like school because teachers don’t understand cognitive principles, and in turn, they don’t teach as well as they could. However, he doesn’t pay much attention to the aspect of freedom, or lack thereof, when it comes to school. Students are expected to be in the same place at the same time, day in and day out. They don’t have a choice of when they begin and end learning, when they can eat a snack, when they can do exercise and more.

Although this structure is beneficial at a young age because there needs to be some layout for organization, it gets less productive as students get older. On the other hand, when students enter college, they often enjoy the experience much more because they have more freedom. However, traditional college campuses still require that students be at a certain place during a certain time to attend scheduled lectures, office hours and discussion groups.

To counteract these feelings of constriction, one of the most free ways to learn, in nearly every sense of the word, is to attend an online university. University of the People is not only tuition-free, but it also benefits students who want to design their own schedule and continue to take care of their responsibilities outside of school, like work and family. With online education, students have the freedom to access course material and discussion groups whenever they want to.

3. Memorization Over Understanding

Many schools still expect students to memorize facts that won’t be useful in their life, but instead, the instructors use this as a tool to test students. Then, students are expected to regurgitate the same information with no actual comprehension and critical thinking. However, in life, memorization is less important, especially as digital technology continues to expand. Rather, problem solving, communication and critical thinking skills are of utmost importance.

4. Standardized Testing

More often than not, school systems use standardized tests to measure a child’s intelligence. This is often a faulty indication of a child’s intelligence due to various reasons. It is apparent that oftentimes the students have not learned what is being questioned, and multiple choice questions require less cognitive thought than response work, which engages the child in the need to understand the material, gain interest, and interpret the material by using inferential thinking and high-level critical analysis in order to better process ideas.

5. Interest Levels

Another aspect of learning involves the success level that can be achieved by a student, which is highly linked to age-appropriateness of the material being taught and then tested. Additionally, a child needs to have some interest in the material in order to benefit from learning and retaining what is learned. Learning cannot be isolated but must be delivered in context in order for a student to learn and apply Bloom’s Taxonomy to produce higher-level skills like the acquisition of factual knowledge to process thought.

It is essential to understand new ideas in the context of what has previously been learned. Learning is continuous and as we grow, so we process ideas better from previously learned concepts. In other words, an adult thinks completely differently to a child when presented with material since an adult is more likely to process the ideas from a different and more mature point of view.

6. Outside Factors

It has been discovered that both genes and one’s environment play a role in learning. Intelligence occurs from taking risks and remaining persistent in the desire to achieve, as well as genes. In studying the role of nature and nurture, psychologists have found that hereditary genes do impact one’s intelligence. However, genes are not the only impactful determinant of intelligence. Environmental factors like nutrition, formal schooling, toxic substances and more do impact one’s ability to learn and retain information.

Benefits of School

Regardless of some students’ contempt or dislike of school, there are many benefits to attending school, especially to earn one’s higher education degree. These include:

• Networking: School is where many people make lifelong friends. As students get older, they also have the ability to network with peers that could lead to business opportunities and more.
• Learning: Naturally, schools are designed for learning and educational purposes, and therefore, it is where most people learn both basic and specific information that helps them in jobs and in life.
• Socialization: Students learn from being around people their age, as well as older and younger students. These socialization skills prepare people for the workplace, becoming a parent and more.
• Life Skills: There are many life skills that are honed during one’s educational lifetime, which are transferable both in jobs and at home. These include time management skills, communication skills, organization, responsibility and more.

Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Benefits of Online Learning

When it comes to higher education, the freedom to choose one’s learning environment only expands. This means that students from anywhere in the world can choose to earn their higher education degrees with nothing more than an internet connection, thanks to online schools like the University of the People who believe in education as a human right.

These benefits include:

• Freedom and flexibility to choose when to learn by logging on
• Democratization and accessibility for people all around the world to quality higher education
• Lower cost college that is tuition-free and still supports scholarships and financial aid
• Big benefits like increased job prospects and salary expectations

The Bottom Line

After some consideration, it becomes more clear why students don’t like school. But, at the same time, it’s easy to see why school becomes more desirable as people grow up and gain more freedom to choose their own learning environment. Although people have different ways of learning, school does offer a good starting point for socialization, networking, education and the opportunity to instill a lifelong love of learning.

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90,000 11 years of hard labor. Why do our kids hate school?

Problems of modern school

Why in our schools, despite the great efforts made by our education officials, it has become so hard and tedious to study? Why do our children perceive school as the most unpleasant memories of their lives?

So we celebrated a birthday. We are 7 years old. Kindergarten is over and we are preparing to enter school. During this period, for a child, the whole world is a huge interesting place, where every day there are new impressions, new events and new joys. But, this is only true until the age of 7, when our children are faced with an educational institution called school. nine0005

* All children expect something unusual and interesting from the school.

How many expectations and worries from the first trip to school. Prepared all notebooks and textbooks. Checked pencils, pens, erasers. All this is neatly folded into pencil cases and placed in satchels and briefcases. Waiting for something unusual and beautiful, a new stage in a small seven-year life.

* crossing the threshold of a school for the first time – what could be more interesting? nine0005

The first of September. Many unfamiliar children. Happy smiling mom and dad stand on the sidelines in a group of parents like them who brought their children to school for the first time. There are many flowers everywhere, music is heard. And now the first teacher takes the first-graders lined up in pairs to the first lesson in their short life… ” nine0027 Can I not go to school today? ”

* a typical class of a Russian general education school. Everything is the same as fifty years ago. All the same desks, textbooks on the tables, knapsacks and backpacks.

He goes to school for some time, he diligently does his homework, but…, the negative moments grow and, in the end, most of our children begin to perceive school as some kind of punishment.And when homework begins, you can completely forget about the former happy life.0005

* a typical picture in the lesson

From this moment on, the child becomes hostage to a rigid educational system , which turns his existence into one continuous hard day with lack of sleep, cramming, lessons, reproaches from parents and teachers. And so 11 years …!

• Why does the modern system of Russian education develop in most students a persistent aversion to it?
• Why do many high school students remember it as a difficult and undesirable period in their lives?

Is it like this everywhere?

Learning, of course, is not easy, but it is in the power of adults to set up the learning process correctly, to interest a small student in the very process of obtaining knowledge. Someone will say that this is impossible, that school is always a compulsion. And often, such an opinion can be heard from people in one way or another connected with our education. nine0005

I want to tell these people that they are wrong!

There are examples of a completely different approach to school education. And you don’t have to go far for them. Look at our closest neighbor – Finland . * this is how a small rural school in Finland looks like

* Finnish schools have no fences, USE and GEF

Finnish schools do not have fences, USE or GEF, and teachers do not hide from their parents behind fences and guards.

Education for children in Finland is fundamentally different from ours!

* this is how Finnish school classes look like In Finland, they adhere to the theory that individual subjects themselves, such as geography, history, mathematics, etc. , are boring enough for a purposeful “mono” study. But if these same subjects are coupled with another question, then studying them is much more interesting. nine0005

Here is an example:

World War II. Using her example, Finnish schoolchildren study not only the historical aspect of this event, but also touch geography , mathematics , drawing and even singing . In a word, you need to “ catch on to event ” and build on it in the study of various subjects.

* at a lesson in a Finnish school.

And taking, for example, the course “ Fundamentals of working in a restaurant / cafe “, students will be able to better understand micro- and macroeconomics, practice speaking in English and improve their communication skills with other people.

This study option for young schoolchildren is much more interesting than the usual memorization of lessons from textbooks, as is done in our country.

* in a Finnish school class

Unlike us, Finland has been a leader in the international education quality assessment PISA for several years now.

According to the results of the analysis of the International Program for the Assessment of Educational Achievements (PISA), the indicators of the quality of Russian education have decreased over the past three years. In the ranking of 79 countries for 2018, Russian schoolchildren were in 31st place in reading literacy (479 points out of 1000), in 30th place in mathematical literacy (488 points) and in 33rd place in science literacy (478 points). ). This is stated in a report published on Tuesday, December 3, on the website of the Federal Institute for Educational Quality Assessment, which is the national center for PISA in Russia. nine0005

That is why the eyes of the world educational science have been riveted to the Finnish education system for the third year in an attempt to determine the reasons for success and transfer positive experience into their realities.

* Lessons take place in a simple and relaxed atmosphere.

* and sometimes the lesson can be held right in the school lobby.

Why don’t our officials come up with new Federal State Educational Standards that drive our education system into the “backyard” of the world educational process, but simply try to adopt the already tested and successful education option from our closest neighbors? nine0005

Maybe in this case a comprehensive school for our children will not be associated with 11 years of hard labor?

See also:

Chinese students are the smartest in the world. Russian did not enter the top 20.

I don’t want anything! Young people do not see the point in education.

Russian schoolchildren have formed a new sexual orientation.

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10 reasons why children do not want to go to school

Timofey Drogin, 11-year-old speaker of the teen-conference “Tomorrow named_”, tells why children lose their desire to learn and eventually start to just hate school. nine0241

I am about a year old in this photo.

I’m already five years old on this one, I went to kindergarten to prepare for school.

And this is me in the first grade.

See the difference? Now I will tell you about ten reasons why children do not like to go to school.

1. Teacher

When you first come to school, they immediately try to instill fear in you. One of them is the fear of the teacher.

2. Fear of evaluation

After the first fear, evaluation fear develops. And then the fear of punishment by parents, the headmaster. At school, they don’t look at who you are, you are judged only by your grades.

3. Fear of making a mistake

Another fear is the fear of making a mistake. School does not teach that it is possible and necessary to make mistakes, because this is the only way you can learn something.

4. Trolling

Another reason is ridicule from classmates. And it’s often the fault of teachers who make fun of children by pointing out that they are not doing something as well as their classmates. For them, the grade is more important than the student. I went to the children’s creativity club, I learned to weave from beads, sculpt from dough, make leather bracelets and much more. And when a teacher from my circle came to my school to offer a master class and told about my achievements, the head teacher was surprised: “Timofey? This can’t be!” nine0005

5. Stupid tests

These tests given in class are incredibly stupid because they don’t have a choice of answer. The child, in order to get a good grade, tries to guess one answer from those offered, but he may have his own opinion, which he cannot write. I do not think that the time will come when everyone will remember all the capitals of the world, everything that Taras Shevchenko wrote, the square root of five. It seems to me that if a person becomes interested in something, he will learn more than a child in 10 years of school. And if he needs knowledge from other areas, then he can easily get it. nine0005

6. Volume of homework

I have read that there is no evidence that homework affects children’s performance and education. Once I was given so many English assignments that after three hours of writing I got up and could not straighten my neck. I was taken to the emergency room, and for a whole week I walked in a neck brace.

7. Prohibition of uniqueness

Schools do not like very much if someone is different from others. It starts with the teacher, is passed on to the students and stays with them for life. nine0005

8. School doesn’t teach you to be happy

I read that when John Lennon of The Beatles was five years old, his mother told him that the most important thing in life was to be happy. Then he went to school and was asked there: “What do you dream of becoming in life?”. He replied: “Happy.” They told him, “You don’t understand the task.” To which he replied: “You do not understand life.”

9. School does not teach how to work with information

For example, I watch a YouTube channel where a physics teacher explains the material in an easy and entertaining way. Reading or viewing such resources can replace dozens of boring lessons. nine0005

10. School does not prepare for adult life

School is preparation for adult life. But it does not teach how to maintain and increase income, or how to get it, or, in general, how to earn. I believe that the main subject at school could be a subject in which we would be taught to understand each other. After all, the ability to communicate is the most important thing.

6 tips for kids to survive in school

1 . To learn how to survive in school, you need to have a life outside of it.