Every parent and teacher has heard them. The frustrated student who complains about school, usually because he encounters it in a way that is not ordered to his liking or expectation. Such complaints fall into several categories, and it’s helpful to identify them.
Complaints About Meaning and Purpose. These are the most common and are usually captured in pointed soundbites: “Why do I have to learn this?” or “When am I ever going to use this?” In the age of Google and AI, we can add a new one, “Why do I need to know this if I can just look it up?” These are actually good questions because the underlying issue pertains to knowledge as intrinsically valuable or merely utilitarian. If it is the latter, the student might have an arguable point. The truth is that we learn things we might never “use,” because they are aspects of the world God made. There are no neutral facts; all discoverable facts are connected to the infinite mind of God and are prima facie worthy of our attention, reflection, and even mastery. It is the mark of ignorance and immaturity that fails to understand this—which is precisely where young students are situated. They are not mature enough to make a judgment on the value of the material before them and will only realize much later the wisdom of their teachers.
The heavy burden of the school and its faculty is to present material properly, avoiding a creeping instrumentalism, “This will help you get into college,” or “This will improve your résumé.” Such statements are not false, but they are secondary. In the classical, Christian curriculum, we study a thing because it is true; we apply ourselves to learning because a thing is beautiful; we wrestle with hard things because they form the soul. It takes time for a child to grow into this awareness.
Engagement and Interest Complaints. A student gets in the car, and when asked about the day, replies, “School is soooo boring,” or “Can’t we do something more interesting?” Parents are tempted to locate this sentiment in their perception of the child’s intellectual ability, quietly believing that ‘yes, my child is very bright and is under-challenged in school.’ Sometimes that may be the case, but it might also be overlooking the tendency in children—even capable ones—to succumb to the vice of acedia, otherwise known as sloth. This condition should not be understood as laziness. Slothful students and adults are sometimes the busiest of all. Sloth is not busyness vs. idleness; rather, sloth is a posture of the heart that is bored with the world as being unworthy of attention, coupled with an unwillingness to engage actively. In its most mature (and deadly) form, sloth is boredom with God himself. In its nascent form sloth is the affliction that sets in over long summer breaks when parents hear the “I’m bored” complaint far too much! It’s not that there’s nothing to do; there’s plenty with which to occupy oneself, but engagement takes interest coupled with effort. Parents should address this forthrightly for what it is. The underlying question at stake is this: Is learning meant to delight the mind, or merely occupy time? Good teachers counter this when they are able continually to experience wonder in what they teach and convey that to students in their care.
Social and Identity Complaints. A third category of frustration is found in the way students belong and compare themselves to one another. By middle school students are very aware of which students make the highest grades, which students are the best athletes, and which students come from affluent families, meaning they have more gadgets and better vacations. We call this the “Brains-Body-Bank” syndrome and we teach into it. It manifests itself, in part, when a student says, “Everyone gets it but me;” or “I’m just bad at math.” Maybe they don’t say anything at all but carry a quiet shame, embarrassed by their perceived deficit. The antidote to this is to identify it as a self-labeling reflex, and to recognize the underlying question which is this: Is learning a performance or is it a process of becoming? Of all places, school should be a safe place to fail and to try again. Our vision for students is that they learn to meet failure with confidence and success with humility. Struggle—academic, social, athletic—is a means of growth, and as such is not something to be avoided. Healthy struggle, however, is co-opted by too easily allowing a self-defined label to stick, even as we account for students with diagnosed impediments that make learning difficult.
Student complaints should be seen for what they are, even though children do not fully understand what they are saying. Their complaints are actually not objections but unarticulated questions. They pertain to the very grown-up issues of meaning, agency, identity, affections, and delight. Put this way, we can welcome the student complaint, confident that a classical, Christian education is uniquely designed to entertain the inquiry, and that the classical, Christian teacher is striving to meet students with the support they need to grow in wisdom and virtue.
