The job of schooling isn't to teach skills and knowledge, it's to teach deference and compliance. I can prove this quite straightforwardly. Imagine how our system would treat a student who aced every test, completed every assignment perfectly, but who habitually truanted and generally refused to toe the line.
If schools were simply a place of teaching and learning, such a student should face no problems, but in most schools he would be highly unlikely to graduate. The imposition of discipline is not merely a secondary function necessary to facilitate teaching, it is an end in itself. Children are taught that a teacher must be obeyed because he is powerful, not because he is worth listening to. There is a clear and persistent message that teachers should be respected and obeyed simply because they have a bigger desk. Even in jurisdictions where it is relatively easy to dismiss incompetent teachers, they are rarely dealt with. I believe that there is simply no demand to do so, as teaching is merely a ruse to allow for schooling to happen.
I argue that the failures of our school system are not simply symptomatic of underfunding, union problems or poor strategy. They are the product of our inability to define the purpose of schooling, our unwillingness to confront the role of schools as cheap daycare, and our hypocrisy as to the real purpose of schooling as a thing apart from education.
While I agree with this sentiment to an extent, I hate when people bring it up like this. There's a lot of good reasons for schools to have rigid rules other than the cynical idea that schools are purely there to teach kids to conform so that they'll make good, obedient workers.
For one, parents expect that schools are, at least to some extent, keeping their kids safe and out of trouble during school hours. It may not always work out that way, but when the rule is that they have to be in class, at least the school isn't endorsing them leaving, so there's a lot less liability.
Also, there's a lot of gray area that arises if you start making exceptions. How old is old enough for high achievers to skip school? Obviously, you're not going to let a first grader skip school, but when does it start becoming ok? And how high achieving do they have to be? If a kid has a B+ in one class, is he still allowed to skip school? And when do you tell a straight-A student whose grades start to slip that he has to start coming to class again? If he gets one B on one test, that's probably just a fluke, but where do you draw the line and tell him he's not doing well enough?
Plus the lower-achieving kids would complain of unfairness. And it's a lot harder to enforce rules against truancy when some people are allowed to leave. People would see kids leaving school, but might assume that they're just approved truants.
It also raises the incentive to cheat. A student could cheat on every assignment and test to keep up his A averages so that he can keep skipping school, and then he'd really be learning absolutely nothing. That's an extreme case, and he'd probably get caught eventually, but when you reward high marks on tests, people will go to great lengths to do better, but they might not be the lengths you want.
Your proof is not logically sound. The same failure would confront a total brown-noser who quite literally failed every exam. I know a guy who essentially failed out of high school, didn't do college, and then got into one of the country's best law schools - because he is incredibly bright. You need both sides of the equation to really succeed.
School admittedly has multiple purposes, but your view of it is, I think, unnecessarily cynical. Sure, there are bad teachers and systems out there, but there are also amazing teachers, principals, and superintendents doing unbelievable things with students - both academically, and socially.
I dunno. I took second semester Chemistry when I was a senior in college... I never showed up at class except to take the weekly quiz. The professor was not at all offended that I got the highest score in the class.
That's backwards. Teachers do not force students to be compliant. On the contrary, parents and school administrations force teachers to be compliant when their students ask to be allowed not to work as hard.
If schools were teaching deference and compliance, you wouldn't have such a student who is truant yet aced every test.
The truth is our schools aren't teaching much of anything, and it's partially because of the attitude you outline in your post - everyone believes that their child is that exceptional student who despite being an arrogant prick and never showing up to class, is still brilliant. Consequently they raise hell until teachers relent and give their children good grades. Now, of course this is less likely to happen with the aforementioned truant child, because the teacher has something concrete to point to as to why the child is undeserving. In the case of the child who shows up every day and does work yet is not learning, the teacher has nothing to tell the parents other than the truth - and the truth will cause the teacher a world of grief.
Of course, really, parents don't have to actually cause trouble. The assumption that every child is deserving of good grades has been institutionalized, so teachers have to have wills of iron to go in year after year and risk parental attacks.
If schools were simply a place of teaching and learning, such a student should face no problems, but in most schools he would be highly unlikely to graduate. The imposition of discipline is not merely a secondary function necessary to facilitate teaching, it is an end in itself. Children are taught that a teacher must be obeyed because he is powerful, not because he is worth listening to. There is a clear and persistent message that teachers should be respected and obeyed simply because they have a bigger desk. Even in jurisdictions where it is relatively easy to dismiss incompetent teachers, they are rarely dealt with. I believe that there is simply no demand to do so, as teaching is merely a ruse to allow for schooling to happen.
I argue that the failures of our school system are not simply symptomatic of underfunding, union problems or poor strategy. They are the product of our inability to define the purpose of schooling, our unwillingness to confront the role of schools as cheap daycare, and our hypocrisy as to the real purpose of schooling as a thing apart from education.