A good school, for me, is the one where kids who love reading, who love learning, who enjoy accumulating new knowledge are in the majority. As a result, nobody can say, “Ha ha, look at this freak, he likes to read books. Let’s beat him up!” because there isn’t anyone like this at this school. The teachers there don’t have to spend any time or energy on getting the “ha ha, let’s beat him up” kids to stay in place and listen to the material, so they can introduce more material and study it more in depth.
We are all former smart kids here on the blog. Honestly, isn’t this the definition of the good school that we’d all die to attend back in the past? A place where we could just be ourselves with our stacks of favorite books and our nerdy hobbies? Where it wouldn’t be a mark of losership to be us but would be the norm?
What else can a good school possibly be? A place with a huge new gym and tons of the shiniest gadgets? A bunch of teachers who have some really uncommon, life-changing pedagogy [that doesn’t exist, by the way]? A different way to teach school subjects that is unknown to everybody else? When you were a kid, would you choose the school I described above or the gadgets and PhD-holding pedagoguess?
When I say I had a great class this semester, what can I possibly be referring to if not the students who were there to make it great? Same me, same material, same pedagogy would produce a completely different result with different students. A school doesn’t make students good. Students make a school good.
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