Obligation to School?

In a recent post on facebook regarding the proposal by Brandstad to link teacher pay to kids' test scores, one comment in particular has been niggling at me and irritating me for the last few days.  The comment that bothered me stated that there are a lot of roadblocks for good teachers, one of them being kids that don't care.  There were a few other roadblocks that I also don't agree with (I am opposed to putting all the blame on children and their parents), but this was the one that has been sticking with me.

Why should kids care about school?  What obligation do they have to care?

I recently took a class and one of the topics that we discussed in this class was ethics, what being a good citizen means and whether a person has an obligation to their community, to their state, or to their government.  There wasn't a correct answer to this question, each student had an opinion backed up by their own values and reasoning.  I do believe that if we all want to live well, then it is important that we all work together to create a good environment.  Part of this belief, though, stems from the fact that I have a voice in my community, in my government.  If I lived in a totalitarian regime where no ordinary citizen had any say in the laws or who governed, I would probably believe that I didn't owe anything to my community.

School is a very authoritarian environment, there is no democracy.  Children don't have a say in much of anything in school. They don't get to choose what things they want to learn, or how much time they can spend on math or reading.  They don't get to choose if they listen to a lecture sitting or standing.  They don't get to pick their teachers or have any say in which classroom they are in.  I know a number of people who would say that kids shouldn't be able to make those choices, maybe they can't be trusted to make those choices.  But why is a child supposed to care about being in a place where they have absolutely no say in how they learn, where they have no ownership at all.

The reality is that although you can force children and adults to do a lot of things by coercion or threat of punishments, one thing you can't do is make someone care.  My employer can make me come to work every day, be there on time, do the job that is assigned to me, but caring is an intrinsic thing. Caring comes from seeing the value in something.  It comes from feeling valued and enjoying what you are doing. 

If kids are supposed to care about school, then they need to be part of the process.  They have to have some say in how things work, in what they are doing.  They have to be able to make choices in their learning.  They have to be given something to care about.  Just because a child doesn't care about sitting at a desk writing out dozens of math problems doesn't mean a child doesn't care about learning.  It only means the child doesn't care about sitting at a desk writing out dozens of math problems (and frankly, neither do I).  There are a lot of things wrong with our educational system, but children not caring isn't one of them.  Children not caring is merely a symptom of deeper problems.