If you knew your schoolwork like you knew them songs…

“If you knew your schoolwork like you knew them songs…”

I grew up hearing some version of this from Black adults and educators, particularly Boomers and Gen X. The assumption was that if you could memorize an entire song, you could memorize your schoolwork. You just weren't applying yourself.

But music is learning. It requires pattern recognition, sequencing, memory, language processing, rhythm, prediction, and repetition. It can also help regulate the body. A child who knows every word to an album is demonstrating an ability to learn. The question is why that same child might struggle to engage with the way they're expected to learn in school.

I thought about this recently while talking to a friend about her son's experience with school. He doesn't particularly enjoy penmanship. I hyperfocused on my handwriting as a child, and my handwriting is small, neat, and beautiful. But that's not every child's experience. What feels satisfying to me might feel tedious or punishing to a child who would rather be cutting paper, building something, painting, or working with markers and crayons.

Instead of insisting that he write the same letter fifty times on lined newsprint, I suggested an app that turns letter formation into a little game, with a train following a track from one point to another. He's still practicing the movement and building muscle memory. The difference is that someone has considered how to make the process engaging.

Why is that such a radical idea?

I talk to children the way I talk to people: in ways they can understand, while paying attention to what they're communicating back to me. I narrate what I'm doing with babies. I give children language for what's happening around them. I try to anticipate their needs, explain transitions, and create opportunities for them to participate in their own lives. I don't believe every difficult task should be eliminated or every frustration prevented. I believe we should be thoughtful about how we help children develop the capacity to do difficult things.

And yet we send children into institutions where so much of their day is organized around compliance. They have to ask to use the bathroom. They have to wait for permission to move. They have fifteen minutes to eat lunch. Their belongings are locked away, their schedules are dictated, their movements are monitored, and their behavior is evaluated constantly. They can be treated as guilty before they've done anything wrong.

Recently, talking with my brother, who works in corrections, I found myself thinking about the similarities between the structures that govern schools and prisons. The comparison is uncomfortable, but discomfort doesn't make a question illegitimate. ID Numbers. Scheduled movement. Restricted access. Numbered transactions in cafeterias. Permission to leave a designated space. Isolation as punishment. Rules that prioritize order and control over individual autonomy.

And I'm not suggesting that schools and prisons are the same. I'm asking what it means when children spend years in environments where so much of their day is organized around surveillance, restriction, and obedience. What are we teaching them about their bodies, their time, their needs, and their right to exercise judgment?

We talk about the school-to-prison pipeline as though it begins when a child encounters the criminal justice system. But what about the years spent learning that authority determines when you can move, eat, speak, use the bathroom, or be alone? What happens when a child learns that being good means being quiet, staying in line, and never making an adult's job more difficult?

I think about the teachers I've known, some of whom are phenomenal educators working under extraordinary constraints. And this isn't an indictment of individual teachers, it's more a question about the systems in which they work, the conditions they're given, and the expectations imposed on children whose needs cannot possibly be met by a single method of instruction.

An eight-hour school day spent practicing compliance and regurgitating information isn't the same thing as an eight-hour education. Children need structure, but structure should serve their development. They need repetition, but repetition doesn't have to be devoid of imagination. They need boundaries, but boundaries don't require stripping them of autonomy.

And if a child can memorize an entire album but struggles with a worksheet, perhaps we should be curious about the difference before we decide the child is the problem.

What if we stopped treating engagement as a reward children must earn through obedience and started treating it as a necessary part of how they learn? What if we designed learning environments around curiosity, movement, music, art, experimentation, and the actual developmental needs of children?

I keep thinking about the children I've cared for and the kind of work I chose to do instead of becoming a traditional classroom teacher. I wanted the room to notice the child. I wanted the schedule to make room for the person. I wanted learning to be something children could participate in, not merely something adults delivered while children sat still.

We spend so much time asking children what they want to be when they grow up. We spend considerably less time asking what kind of people our institutions are teaching them to become.

What are we teaching children when we teach them, above all else, to comply?