“You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink”. This is the philosophy that schools should follow when educating children. It is not the duty of the teacher to force the child to learn. It is only the responsibility of the teacher to steer the child in the right direction and give them incentive to want to learn.
If someone is continually pressuring you to bake a cake, are you going to be inclined to actually do it? Most likely the answer is no. And if you do happen to give in to the pressure and bake the cake your only motivation for doing it would be to make the person who keeps pressuring stop, not because you actually want to do it. This same concept applies to education. When teachers badger their students to do their homework, study, or pay attention it’s going to have the opposite effect. The child will become distant from education because they will associate it with negative connotations of nagging and berating. If they actually do the assignment it will only be to obtain a grade; they won’t retain any of the information. This is both a wasted effort on the teacher’s part and detrimental to the child’s education. Ralph Emerson states that “it is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own”. Teachers don’t realize that dictating what it is that the child is supposed to learn alters the path that has already been chosen for the child. The role of the teacher is not to decide what or how much the child learns because instead of improving the child’s education they hinder it. Teachers need to allow the child to learn what they were already destined to learn. They need to “respect the child”.
The educational system has another flaw. In addition to unnecessary manipulation of the child’s education, schools tend to use more abstract teaching...