Why kids hate school is the title and the subject of this blogpost in the Washington post with an overview of possible reasons to hate the different topics, e.g.:
History: Yes yes, those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. I guess no U.S. president ever took history because they have all forgotten the lessons of the Vietnam War, the history of Iraq and the history of foreign incursions into Afghanistan. You will learn untruths about the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and World War II, all meant to teach that the United States is the best country in the world. Forget what they teach you in history. Read about it on your own if it interests you.
But let us look at the main question: do kids really hate school? Well, it looks like it if we examine these figures from the OECD:
I’ve added the fine print because from them we learn that it isn’t really research by the OECD, but by the WHO, check here and that they changed the question from ‘liking school a lot’ to ‘liking school’. I tend to think that this is not really the same, or is liking your girlfriend or boyfriend the same as liking her or him a lot?
Ok, the figures for ‘liking school a lot’ aren’t that high, but ‘a lot’, seems, ehm, a lot. Sadly because of the narrowing down the thinking becomes very fast the majority doesn’t like school. The next step is: kids hate school. Actually if I look to some regional research for Flanders we see that 2 out of 3 pupils actually like going to school and even 77% likes going to higher education. I don’t think were that exceptional.
This WHO-research is one of the most elaborated I know, but I’m looking for other figures and other research on kids liking or disliking school?
Btw, if you don’t know the book yet, Daniel Willingham has written a great book in 2009, called ‘why don’t students like school‘.
Also btw, these are the more recent graphs by the WHO: