The “Best” Education Is Not In Our Best Interest

Why true success can never be achieved with our current model of education

My job has brought me into hundreds of classrooms across North America. From the most expensive private schools in the country to rural schools filled with the children of undocumented migrants, I’ve seen it all. 

As a result, people expect me to have a clear idea of the type of educational environment I want for my son.

While I know how he can get the “best” education (like most things in life, just follow the money), I wonder whether this type of education is actually in his best interest.

As I ask myself this question, I keep remembering my childhood friend Calvin.

I remember how our moms also became friends, eventually our younger brothers too. I remember the rusty brown van his jubilant parents drove and the wheelchair lift outside his dimly-lit rickety trailer home. 

Above all, I remember what it was like to be unrushed and oblivious to the pressure to advance. 

It’s unlikely two kids like us would meet in school today. His cerebral palsy was “severe” enough that he’d be in some sort of special education classroom today. I was a fast enough learner that I’d be in some sort of gifted and talented one. If one student can’t benefit the others, why put them in the same room?

The best schools have one goal: prepare students to get into the best colleges. The best colleges have one goal: prepare students to succeed, to shape the world in some way (that will inevitably attract more students and capital to said college). 

Students like Calvin get in the way of these goals. 

But this isn’t an argument for all the other things I learned from Calvin. I’d argue I didn’t learn anything from him; he wasn’t a prop to teach me empathy or how to embrace diversity. We just happened to be the same age and live in the same neighbourhood. 

We just had fun together.

Fun.

Unfortunately, we don’t value fun as much as we value success, especially when it comes to school. Fun is allowed, but only if it helps students learn more, acquire a new skill, or pad their CV so they can continue to secure the “best” education.

Since 2001, the time the average elementary student gets for recess has dropped from 60 minutes to 25 Even though research shows that student behaviour and learning improves with time free-play, we can’t seem to shake the idea that we can’t afford our students to have fun. 

But I think when we dream of success, what we are really dreaming of is the feeling of freedom that fun gives us. 

When we are having fun, we are satisfying all the most basic human cravings: to connect, to create, to grow, and even to disconnect (whether from a bad day at work, the pressures of parenthood, or horrifying headlines).

We are our best, most authentic selves, when we are having fun.

Fun is not a waste of time. It is a spiritual practice that deepens our connections to others and ourselves. 

That is what I want for my son. 

I don’t want him to turn off the parts of himself that make him him, the way I did to get my Ivy League degree and rise the corporate ladder. 

I can now see that Calvin did teach me one thing: that the “best” education is not the one that makes me most successful, but the one that preserves my humanity. 

I don’t care how slowly my son moves through the curriculum, as long as he learns that true success can never come from separation.