Objective:
Unlearn good student indoctrination that breeds shame.
Pivot toward inclusive thinking.
Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world.
—Nelson Mandela
J
onathan Mooney was twelve years old when he finally learned to read. His journey, which he calls “tortuous,” included dropping out of school in sixth grade—then reenrolling, only to be told by high school guidance counselors and teachers that he was destined to end up in jail—or if he was really lucky, flipping burgers.1 But instead of putting on the orange jumpsuit, or the red polo with Five Guys embroidered on it (those fries!), he took a path no one would’ve guessed.
Against all the odds, and with the help of his mom and sister, Mooney rejected the expectations placed upon him, the ones he’d started to internalize after years of shaming and scolding. He even had his suicide planned out. He spent more time in the hallway, hanging out with janitors, than in the classroom. He was on a first-name basis with Shirley, the principal’s secretary. He hid in the bathroom, tears streaming down his face, after being humiliated when forced to read aloud to the class.
Mooney was pegged as a screw-up through most of his school years. His behavior was textbook attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but until this came to light, he was treated like he didn’t belong in school at all. No one would’ve predicted that the unruly kid squirming at his desk would become the man who would graduate from Brown University with honors in English literature, or go on to become a Truman Scholar. But that’s just what he did.
He didn’t stop there. Mooney coauthored Learning Outside the Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution. Then he hit the road.
Mooney pooled his money and bought an old short school bus, the type used to transport kids to special education classes. He converted it to a makeshift RV, then drove 35,000 miles across forty-five US states in four months. Mooney interviewed people with so-called disabilities, exposing the myths of normalcy and “good student” indoctrination. His second book, The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal, tells a very different story than what schools and societies sell: tales of human triumph and resilience, not deficits and disorders. This is imagineering at its finest.
Mooney now calls himself a “thirty-year-old punk,” has his own nonprofit, and is one of the great champions of the disability rights movement. He doesn’t tiptoe around or mince words. He tells his audiences that “normal people suck”; that human variance should be celebrated, not punished; and that there’s no room for school shame and limited definitions of “good” or “smart.” Students who think and live differently should not be labeled “those kids,” then written off as destined to fail because they aren’t like everyone else.
Jonathan Mooney makes it easy to want to jump on the bus with him, chanting “normal sucks.” His story is familiar to most of us—whether we have faced screaming teachers and shameful moments because of academic performance, we couldn’t sit still, or we weren’t cookie-cutter versions of the standards held as acceptable. In the place where we were supposed to be given the chance to flourish, many of us felt like worthless misfits. This is a great tragedy, since we spend all our formative years being indoctrinated that we’re not “good” if we don’t land at the magical space on the bell curve.
Going on endless rants against schools and raging against the machine are easy. While such action can sometimes feel cathartic, it might not be as productive as we’d hope. Broadening our definitions of normal and good takes brave voices, like Mooney’s, to help redefine normal. It takes collective action and community to reimagineer.
Stop the Crash and Burn
When education is what it can be, it transforms lives. At its best, education embodies Horace Mann’s description as “the great equalizer,” spurring on imagination, creativity, and conscious citizenry. When this happens, it’s pure gold, like Andrea Bocelli’s voice. Grazie.
Schools can also traumatize, holding people in psychological prison and even becoming pipelines to physical prison. Schools mistake brilliant people like Jonathan Mooney for being abnormal. When this happens, it is nothing short of catastrophic. His own turn of events is rare. Too often “those kids” do end up in jail, underachieving, and even dead. As Lost at School author Ross Greene put it, “The wasted human potential is tragic.” School trauma, where “good” student indoctrination blasts the repeated message that you have to be one way or you’re unworthy, leads to serious problems.
School Trauma
Academic Definition
School trauma is the experience and aftermath of having at least one and often a series of deeply distressing instances of powerlessness and shame perpetrated by teachers, administrators, or peers.
Street Definition
Those moments in school that left serious scars. You got put down by people who were supposed to care, leaving you feeling broken.
Students are not the only ones traumatized by the systems. We need to reimagine schools as places where students and teachers could trade in their “Get Me Out of Here” signs for ones that read, “I Matter.” Let’s make schools places where students can tear off the “lazy,” “difficult,” and “stupid” labels that were hastily affixed on them and replace with “creative,” “insightful,” and ”rising leader” ones. It’s the twenty-first century, right? We’re ready for this.
We have a lot of signs and labels to swap out. The problems and opportunities are too big to go solo. Money needs to be put where mouths are. In theory, everyone loves schools, students, and teachers—until it’s time to pay up.
Schools are busy trying to fix a plane while it’s already in flight, as Harvard’s Richard Elmore puts it. We can’t keep blaming planes crashing on pilots, crew, and passengers and not the people in charge of ensuring there’s enough money to pay for fuel and rules are in place to ensure mechanical equipment is functioning properly. We need an army of policymakers, politicians, and businesses side by side with teachers, students, and families—with everyone at the table, as if people’s lives depend on it—because they do. Our whole future does. It’s not just individual students getting left behind. It’s entire communities, and droves of teachers and administrators, dropping like flies.
It’s time to start treating teachers like the dignitaries they are.2 We can’t keep disparaging them and wonder why 50 percent of them leave because of burnout, most within the first three years on the job. And it’s not purely stress symptoms causing the mass exodus. Many teachers find themselves in an ethical pickle once they’ve arrived on the scene to do a job, where they find their hands tied from carrying out the actions they know would make a difference.
As education leader Doris Santoro points out, burnout is pervasive, but there’s something more going on. What we often mistake as burnout is actually a case of demoralization—low morale associated with a system filled with obstacles. After repeatedly hitting walls, teachers can’t find the intrinsic moral rewards that brought them to teaching in the first place. They can’t find that needle in the educational haystack.
Santoro’s research reveals that we often misinterpret the reasons teachers leave as signs of weakness—that they are quitters who can’t take the heat. Sometimes the opposite turns out to be true. Teachers can start to feel like they are joining the side of the Dark Army by staying. It’s Lord Voldermortish; they morally cannot be death eaters. They leave because they can no longer justify participating in a system seeming to do more harm than good.
What’s good for our students is good for our teachers and administrators, too. We can’t keep using them as landing pads for our pointing fingers; instead we need to acknowledge the traumatic and complex circumstances they are trying their best to navigate. The crash and burn needs to stop. It starts with a whole new lineup of programming that makes sure that the planes are fueled and equipment is working to show we actually care about what happens to all the people on the planet.
Change the Channel
Teachers and students will remain on the side of losing if the current educational system stays as is. At present, it seems that a game-show type of programming prevails—the kind that puts the entire jackpot of human sustainability at risk, with only a few winners. We can’t keep rolling the dice; change needs to happen. For starters, here are the shows that need to be taken off air permanently.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
In this commodity mind-set, people and education are characterized as goods, cheapening their true value. Neither should be lumped as such, but that’s the M.O. of the popular show that puts dollar signs in our eyes. The questions and answers are predictable:
Which of the following best characterizes $ucce$$
A. Money.
B. Getting in to your dream college so that you can make money.
C. Getting your dream job so that you can make money.
D. All of the above.
Even phone-a-friend lifelines won’t help us escape the $ucce$$-is-spelled-with-dollar-signs indoctrination. It’s waved in front of us across every step of our education: our value in society rests on how much bacon we bring home. It conditions us to think $ucce$$ can only be measured in six-figure increments, that the value of education is only in the type of job it lands you, not that it actually helps you think or become a better person.
One of the underlying problems within our hypercompetitive market is that education has moved away from a human development model to a business model. Institutions are groveling for dollars behind the scenes just as much as students are. Money muddies the educational waters. When we put such a huge price tag on learning, it gets in the way of basing decisions according to human flourishing
—the real good life that can come out of education, the kind when everyone stops salivating over dollars and sees the greater rewards in positioning human beings to reach their fullest potential.
We need to stop promising money as the answer and instead tell students the truth: that no matter how much money they earn, they will spend what they make on stuff that won’t last, and it still won’t make them any happier. Money is usually the factor that holds people hostage in toxic relationships, breaks up families, and is all forked over to the nursing home anyway.
Survivor
Schools should be the safest islands of all; instead there are countless castaways from education. The challenges given at every turn for students and teachers create unnecessary danger and shame. We need to stop voting them off the island after they’ve been starved—whether of basic needs, rights, and dignities, or of intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual protein. Everyone deserves immunity from elimination. We can’t celebrate the emergence of a sole survivor but need to create alliances among our tribes to move from thinking we have to outwit, outlast, and outplay each other, and instead turn attention on creating a new tribal council that wants everyone not just to survive, but to thrive.
The Gong Show
We can’t keep propping students, teachers, and administrators up on stage, expecting them to deliver a show of a lifetime, then after a few minutes whack the mallet and laugh in their faces. When we define talent in narrow and limiting ways, celebrating only a handful of acts, we diminish the rest. The constant audition is a huge distraction and waste of energy. Plus, the prizes for Best Student and Best Teacher of the Week pale in comparison to not having been pressured and humiliated onto the stage in the first place.
Wheel of Fortune
Some students spin the wheel and get lucky; others go bankrupt. Affluent schools and their privileged constituents are given all the vowels and consonants they need, while the wheels of poor schools are rigged to land on bankruptcy. They become places where, as Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, describes, we ask individuals, especially those most marginalized among us, to “break down doors that have been chained and bolted” in advance of their arrival. Resources cannot be left up to chance. The puzzle isn’t as difficult to solve as we make it, but it requires the best of our collective will to stop the show that favors the few and leaves it up to chance for the many.
Family Feud
Schools and families need to be in partnership, not in a face-off against each other. We quickly judge each’s motivations rather than engage in ways that help us understand. When we ignore family context, including assets and barriers—keys to effective dialogue—we miss the chance to get a fuller picture. We can’t ask families to conform to so-called norms that are not inclusive and do not represent the full body of perspectives at hand.
American Gladiators
While the strength and agility that hard-core competition and team pride can foster are impressive, it can come at a cost. When we’re so nationalistic we become centric, our tendency cranks up to want to dominate and bash anyone not on our team. It’s exhilarating to have a sense of belonging, but it becomes dangerous when we put ourselves in a permanent position of defending territory rather than building alliances and seeing our shared humanity.
Add a New Lineup
It’s time to discontinue shows that put their participants in harm’s way. We have the opportunity to promote inclusivity, where everyone—teachers and educators alike—gets the resources they need to truly thrive. When you cheapen students and their teachers to being like contestants on a game show, even though the game is rigged, viewer discretion won’t be enough. The shows need to be cancelled, even if it’s mid-season. Clearly, we need new shows to help us go beyond school trauma and shame. Here are some immediate replacements:
The Price Is Right
The value of education is priceless, but the price tag has become ridiculous. Spending belts need to be tightened in other areas to make room for the most important investment of all. We can’t keep gypping students. Money needs to be poured in from policymakers and those who can to make sure students and their families who are struggling already don’t fall further behind. The price needs to be right for teachers and educational professionals, too. They shouldn’t be making peanuts for the prestigious work that they do. We need to take a cue from places like Finland to make sure better bids are available to all.
Double Dare
If you’re going to put people on a human hamster wheel, at least make it worthwhile. We need to air the ultimate show that allows for messiness, embraces creativity, and encourages people to take some risks while having fun. We need the kind of show that throws a little slime around without being too toxic. The dares and challenges should allow for practice with stunts that will equip for the bigger obstacle course to come. When education doesn’t leave room for play or offer experiences that connect with the real world, it’s not doing its job. We need to allow opportunities to “dare greatly.”
Name That Tune
When schools become deprived of the arts, everyone suffers. We need music, along with all forms of art in heaping doses, to replenish the heart and souls of our schools. Arts and aesthetics are just as important as mathematics. Music and science pair better than we’d first think. The arts should be integrated across everything we do to keep creativity and beauty alive and well. On the other hand, school concerts featuring screeching recorders or talent shows with repeated renditions of Meghan Trainor and Justin Bieber—someone needs to put an end to that kind of madness.
Are You Smarter Than a Kindergartener?
We need to start with basic manners of life and foundations of learning; even fifth grade might be too ambitious. We can take a cue from Robert Fulghum’s 1990s bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. And not the new-school versions where kids discuss their college ambitions at circle time. Rather, we should invoke the old-school kind of kindergarten, complete with cookies and milk (gluten-free and soy are fine when necessary), afternoon naps, and cleaning up our own messes. We should live Fulghum’s message in full force: share everything, play fair, don’t hit people, and say you’re sorry. We draw, paint, sing, dance, and work some each day, and hold hands and stick together, stay aware of wonder, and remember that, like goldfish, hamsters, white mice, and seeds in Styrofoam cups, we all die. We also need to remember the first word we learn in Dick-and-Jane books—look—and that basic sanitation, the Golden Rule, love, equality, and sane living are what we should strive toward every day.
Amazing Race
Much of our education in life comes outside the classroom. Interactions with people and terrain first unfamiliar to us are like gold. Travel to and communication with other lands not only serve as great adventure but give us perspective that a textbook can’t. We have unprecedented opportunities to send students outside their bounds—to explore, discover, and experience life through endless lenses. Sending them on their own version of an amazing race allows them to use deductive reasoning to figure out clues, navigate foreign territory, interact with people across the globe, and perform various challenges that help them develop into thriving, conscious, twenty-first-century global citizens.
✽ ✽ ✽ ✽
We are all affected by what happens in schools. Like Jonathan Mooney, many of us have endured trauma from the current education-is-a-game-show mind-set that prioritizes money and performance over people. We need to stop the crash and burn and instead find new inclusive programming that helps everyone’s potential for limitless growth and impact. We cannot subscribe that only one type of student is “good,” shaming and excluding the rest. We need to pivot toward inclusive thinking, where all students and educators know that they matter.