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What is the most important part of a teenager’s life? The answer to that question is school. Besides being a place where teenagers spend most of their time, school is the number one variable in how a kid’s future will turn out. Chances are if somebody flunks out of high school they will not get a fulfilling career. If so much is riding on school, how come so many kids are so unmotivated? I can mark myself as a prime example. I have known this paper was coming for weeks, and yet I start it 11 hours before it is due. Nobody needs to tell kids that school is important, but every day my math teacher needs to tell my class to stop talking and get to work. The focus of this paper will be motivation. The reason kids are so unmotivated is because they are put into a system that is too generic to handle the different kinds of student.
As Americans we are lucky to have a public school system. This allows kids from all different social and economic backgrounds to go to school. But a school system is not an easy thing to manage. Public schools are managed by the government. The government does have the time or money to individually handle each school. So instead what they do is set guidelines for every school to fallow. In the end the public school system is like a bag of skittles; every school has its own color, but in the end it’s still a skittle. So what happens when you give skittles to millions of kids? Some will love the skittles and enjoy whatever color you give them, others will not like the color they got but will eat it anyway, the third kind will want M&Ms. it is this third type of kid which will become unmotivated. If these kids are given M&Ms they will be happy and succeed, but they are forced to have skittles. In this paper I will talk about how unmotivated kids treat the school system, why some schools do better than others, and I will end with examples of people who have tried to give kids M&Ms.
What do kids do in school when they don’t want to learn? They use school as an opportunity to push their agenda. This is clear in The Boondocks by Aaron Mcgruder. The Boondocks tells the story of two black kids in an all white suburbia. Students are not motivated so they see school less as a place to learn and more of a place to do their own thing. A main character in the Boondocks is Huey. Huey's character is the stereo typical American revolutionary. In the Boondocks he thinks that public schools are brainwashing the youth into the euro-centric capitalists. This can most easily be seen in the bottom of page 41. Huey was just caught reading a different book in class and he explains his reasoning to the teacher. "{teacher} so if I understand correctly, you do not have your textbook with you, Huey. ... Because you felt there were other texts that deserved priority in your book bag?...Texts like shabazz k. Jenkins How to Tell if Your Teacher is Brainwashing You with Euro centrism. {Huey} Given your stirring tribute to Christopher Columbus last month, I believe I made the right call" (Boondocks Right to be Hostile, p.41) Huey does not trust the school system. So he uses the time to study his own interests. He is not in any way shape or form motivated to learn what they teacher wants to teach him so he what he thinks he should do. While the Boondocks is fiction it is easy to compare the way these two kids view school to how kids in reality view school. I’m arguing that Huey is unmotivated because he did not have the option of choosing a school that would better fit his needs. If Huey had the option of going to a school that taught more about African history or self empowerment he would have been reading the right textbook.
It is common opinion that private schools are better than public schools. This is because private schools are micro managed. I have spent many years in both public and private schools, so I am able to fairly compare them. Private schools have the major advantage of smaller class sizes. This allows the teachers to really get to know the students and make changes to the curriculum that they think will help the students. It wasn’t until I came to a public school did I hear “I don’t have time; I have too many papers to grade”. This is a common case of quality versus quantity. Since public schools have to deal with so many different types of student they don’t have the time to change the curriculum to maximize the learning of the students. Instead they teach what they are told and they hope the students get it. Private schools are usually better because since they are run on their own they can change the way they teach instead of having to fallow guidelines.
In 1995 Lisa Delpit came out with the book Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. She said that low income children are at a disadvantage because of the way they grew up. A child coming from a wealthy family will have 100 books read to them, while low income child will only have 15. (Not real statistics). She then says that this leads to lack of motivation in the lower class kids. By not being read books she argues, kids don’t learn to enjoy reading which has obvious negative effects. She argues that facts like that give children of low income families (usually of color) a disadvantage that should be addressed. By making this realization she has opened up a way to make schools more personal. By her logic if schools expose lower class kids to books when they are young they can increase the chance that those kids will be better motivated students in the future.
What is the number one motivation of teenagers to do well in school? The simple fact is most kids are only motivated enough to not fail. They are more focused on getting out of the school then immersing themselves in the school. It is this fear of failing that has me finishing a paper at 10:33 the night before it’s due. By forcing kids to go to a generic school they have no motivation to learn because they have no desire to be at that school. The reason kids are so unmotivated is because they are put into a system that is too generic to handle the different kinds of student.