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School Teaches Students How To Be Bad Workers: 5 Anti-Work Skills Taught In School.
Students are offered the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary for work, but the structure and underlying ethos of the education system also ‘teaches’ them how to be terrible employees.
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” — A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, 1983
“During my time in school, I have developed many skills that teachers did not intentionally want me to learn, but in a way forced me to because of the way they teach and implement the school rules. These are basically ways to cheat the system discreetly. Things such as writing a whole essay not knowing what I am really talking about and not paying attention in class but acting like I am.” — High School Junior, 2016
Here’s a few things I did when I was a student:
- Plowed through weeks and months of class by daydreaming, doodling, playing games, reading unrelated stuff, and otherwise generally dinking around.
- Talked my way out of deadlines, extending them, sometimes indefinitely.
- Copied homework, answers, and projects to receive credit for work I didn’t do.
- Ignored everything until the night before the exam and pulled all nighters to finish essays.
- Lied to teachers about my mental state, or home state, or some kind of state, in order to avoid consequences and work.
- Learned to nod when applicable, look ahead for the answer to the question that was coming my way, write down responses after they had been given out by others, and generally DO as little actual work as absolutely necessary to still pass the class.
By the end of high school I was really, really good at a lot of this. I could read a teacher’s sympathy or mood or general demeanor like a…
