HOW CHILDREN FAIL: Fear and Failure.
The unbelievable incompetence of some of the kids sometimes drives me wild. They can't find anything. They have no paper or pencil when it's time for work. Their desks are a mess. They lose library books. If they do homework at home, they leave it there; if they take home material to do homework, they leave the assignment at school. Thev can't keep their papers in a notebook. Yet they are not stupid or incapable children; they do many things well.Ted is a very intelligent, alert, curious, humorous, and attractive boy, with a record of unbroken failure and frustration in school. He is an excellent athlete, strong, quick, and well coordinated. But his school papers are as torn, smudged, rumpled, and illegible as any I have ever seen. The other day the class was cleaning out desks, and I was "helping" him. We got about a ream of loose papers out of the desk, and I asked him to put them in the notebook. As always, when he is under tension, his face began to get red. He squirmed and fidgeted, and began to mutter, "They won't fit, the notebook's the wrong size,"-which wasn't true. Finally he assembled a thick stack of papers and began to try to jam them onto one of the rings in his note- book, not noticing that the holes in the papers were at least a half-inch from the ring. As he pushed and fumbled and muttered, I felt my blood pressure rising until, exasperated almost to rage, I said loudly, "For Heaven's sake, leave it alone, do it later, I can't stand to watch any more of it! "
Thinking over this scene, and many others like it, I was suddenly reminded of a movie,A Walk in the Sun, based on the novel by Harry Brown. It showed the adventures of a leaderless platoon of infantrymen during the first day of the invasion of Italy. At one point, while the platoon is moving through some woods, they are surprised by an enemy light tank, which, amid a good deal of confusion, they manage to ambush. When this action is over the soldiers find that their sergeant, who has been growing rapidly more anxious, and is clearly the victim of battle fatigue, has given way completely. They find him hugging the ground, shaking all over, babbling incoherently. They leave him behind, as they move inland toward their vaguely conceived objective. One of the soldiers remarks as they go that the sergeant has finally dug himself a foxhole that they can't get him out of.
It seems to me that children dig themselves similar foxholes in school -- that their fumbling incompetence is in many ways comparable to the psychoneurotic reactions of men who have been under too great a stress for too long. Many will reject this comparison as being wildly exaggerated and inappropriate. They are mistaken. There are very few children who do not feel, during most of the time they are in school, an amount of fear, anxiety, and tension that most adults would find intolerable. It is no coincidence at all that in many of their worst nightmares adults find themselves back in school. I was a successful student, yet now and then I have such nightmares myself. In mine I am always going to a class from which, without the slightest excuse, I have been absent for months. I know that I am hopelessly behind in the work, and that my long absence is going to get me in serious trouble, of what sort I am not sure. Yet I feel I cannot stay away any longer, I have to go.
It is bad enough to be a teacher and feel that the children in your charge are using the conscious and controlled parts of their minds in ways which, in the long run and even in the short, are unprofitable, limiting, and self-defeating; to see them dutifully doing the assigned work and to be sure that they are not getting a scrap of intellectual nourishment out of it; to know that what they seem to have learned today they will have forgotten by next month, or next week, or even tomorrow.
But it is a good deal worse to feel that many children are reacting to school in ways that are not under their control at all. To feel that you are helping make children less intelligent is bad enough, without having to wonder whether you may be helping to make them neurotic as well.