"work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign."
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Chapter 23
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I don't think the problem has much to do with the kids or the teachers, the whole public school structure is a recipe for disaster. You take a bunch of kids, group them by age (rather than emotional intelligence, current knowledge or any other sane criteria), throw them together randomly into groups of 20 or 30. Then take this group and put it in a classroom with an underpaid teacher who is supposed to keep them orderly but has no power to discipline them. You give the teacher a curriculum geared towards one objective - standardize testing, not skills for life, not pursuing the individual interests of the students, not creating a love of learning or teaching kids how to learn on their own, but instead focused on making sure the kids can all perform the same set of basic tasks and regurgitate the same set of memorized facts (learned from state-sponsored textbooks, not first-hand sources), on demand.
If that's not bad enough, you instruct the teacher to be completely politically correct. To teach to the agenda of the state or country, emphasizing less important events in history, culture and even science to make sure the kids get a 'diverse' education regardless of historical or practical significance.
To top it off, you tell the teachers that no child is to be left behind--even if that means that the brightest kids in the class are bored to tears.
It is a system that is so ridiculously and utterly broken that it is a miracle that some kids do come out of it with a semblance of an education and without a complete disgust for learning.
All that without even mentioning the social environment.
Socially kids are placed in an environment that they'll never experience again in their lives. School isn't a meritocracy (like most work places generally are). It's not even like a civic community or neighborhood where you have a little less choice about whom you associate with. You're forced to be around people who you may become friends with and form lifelong relationships, but at the same time if you're unlucky, they are just as likely to judge you based unfairly based on your looks, your race or any other arbitrary factor. It doesn't matter--whatever you get, you're stuck with. It's a job you can't quit, a neighborhood you can't move out of and everyone knows it so no one has to make any effort to accommodate anyone else. You either get lucky or you don't.