Want kids to care about school? Make it useless

Students are bored in school.

In our recently released poll of American teenagers, 68% agreed with the statement "school is boring." When asked why they think America is suffering from problems with students being chronically absent, the most popular response was "they think school is boring, followed close behind by, "they think school is pointless."

Problems with chronic absenteeism and student discipline are well trod ground at this point, and observers are generally reaching for the usual explanations and solutions: Ban phones in school, provide more support services, change discipline procedures.

All perfectly fair, but what if these would just treat the symptoms of a larger problem?

In too many places, schooling has become too narrow, too practical, too measurable, and too spiritless to ignite interest in young people. It has lost touch with the real ends of education. Fifteen years ago, researchers Tom Dee and Brian Jacob surveyed the impact of No Child Left Behind and reported that recent reforms had caused schools "to reallocate instructional time toward tested subjects, to reallocate time within tested subjects toward specific content and skills covered on the exam, and to increase time devoted to narrow test preparation activities that may have little broader value."

By rediscovering what it means to be educated, and reorienting schooling around that, we can better engage students and encourage a deeper connection to school.

The goal of our K-12 education system for the past decade-plus, we've been told, is "college and career readiness." While perhaps noble in intention, it appears to be increasingly insipid in practice. It is lots of disparate skills separated from deeper meaning or purpose.

Let's look at the Missouri Learning Standards, the set of goals that the Show-Me State establishes for its students (and I don't mean to pick on Missouri, I just happen to be from there, this exercise could be replicated in most states).

For grades 6-12 in English Language Arts, the standards fall into three categories: "Comprehend and interpret texts," "analyze craft and structure," and "synthesize ideas from multiple texts."

What is missing there? These are all means, there are no ends. Comprehend what texts? Why? Synthesize what kinds of ideas? To accomplish what?

Education is ultimately about what the Greeks called "eudaimonia," or human flourishing. Continuing into higher education or a fulfilling profession can certainly be part of a flourishing life, but we should be careful not to reduce a flourishing life to either.

In his documentary Why Beauty Matters, the late Roger Scruton intoned, "Put usefulness first, and you lose it. Put beauty first, and what you do will be useful forever. It turns out, nothing is more useful than the useless."

Perhaps the best way to prepare students to succeed in college and in their careers is to teach them to appreciate beautiful things, to seek the truth, and to pursue goodness. Rather than narrowing the domains that we teach, we should be broadening them.

The most common response to this argument that I hear is that it reeks of privilege. Sure, for wealthy students or students with more of a safety net, spending time exploring beauty or what it means to be human is a fine pursuit. But poor kids need skills because they need jobs.

But this is where Scruton's wisdom returns. The current thinking is that we need to teach young people useful things. The problem is that what is useful today might not be useful tomorrow. Manufacturing that was done by hand might be 3D printed in the future. Coding languages may be replaced by AI large language model prompts. We might weld fewer oil pipelines and solder more solar panels. We don't know what the future holds.

But we do know that teaching students about what it means to be virtuous, to be prudent, to be courageous, to seek justice, and to practice temperance will never be out of style. Wouldn't you prefer a boss that has these traits? Wouldn't you prefer to hire people that have them?

We read great works of literature, study history, and observe art not for some practical end, but rather to understand the nature of what it means to be human. What does it mean to love? To lose things you love? To gain power? To wield it? To lose it? What is the nature of family, friends, and community? What do we owe each other? What do we owe ourselves?

None of these things will help someone get their first job. There is not an immediate practicality to them. But because life requires, you know, living, figuring out what it means to be a flourishing person will have all sorts of positive knock-on effects, even if unintentionally. Spending time wrestling with these things will certainly help students be a better co-worker, a better spouse, a better parent, a better citizen, and a better person. People who have learned how to be fair and honest and work hard and be prudent and to critically examine the world around them will always be in demand regardless of the narrow specifics of their job title.

Presenting a vision of education to young people that is not about amassing some set of skills for their college or their careers but a journey to understand themselves and the world might just reignite a fire that has been going out for some time now.

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Michael McShane is director of national research at EdChoice, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to advance educational freedom and choice for all students.