Rethinking Why Schools Exist

Shifting the goal of school from information to empathy

Source: Pixabay/Pexels

When I speak to teachers on the topic of children’s mental health, I often begin by asking, “In the 21st century, what type of adult is more important for our schools to produce: An empathetic adult who lacks information or an informed adult who lacks empathy?”

One step in developing an anti-violent society is the integration of mental health screening, services, and training into schools' curricula. Reliable methods for identifying students at risk for mental health problems, including aggression, already exist (von der Embse, 2022). Although Texas has been piloting such a program on a smaller scale, it sadly had not reached Uvalde in time.

The need for schools to not only address but prioritize mental health is growing. A recent government study indicates that since the advent of Covid, 70 percent of schools saw a rise in students seeking mental health treatment (Meckler, 2022). As it’s becoming more widely understood by administrators that mental health and academic achievement are intertwined, some districts are reluctantly opening to mental health services as a means to improved academic success. Still, having fought for mental health services in schools for many years now, the common retort I hear from many administrators is that schools exist to instruct students in subject matter knowledge. Mental health, they often say, is not the measure of a school’s success; but instead test scores and college acceptance rates.

We need to rethink why schools exist.

Returning to my opening question of information versus empathy, it is indeed possible to be both empathetic and informed. But the education system as it exists was developed in the context of 19th-century needs for the transmission of information. Information came in the form of expensive, and often scarce, printed books. What few libraries existed often charged subscription fees and were cost-prohibitive to large portions of the population. The role of the public school system, therefore, was to disseminate important information.

The scarcity of information didn’t change substantially until Andrew Carnegie started what would become a $60 million project to establish almost 1,700 free libraries in the United States alone, with hundreds more abroad. These free libraries were open to the general public and often transcended racial and gender boundaries (Stamberg, 2013). However, this project only concluded less than a century ago, in 1929, far after the establishment of the school system. The ensuing years saw the further proliferation of information via digital data storage and, ultimately, the interconnectedness of these systems via the internet.

Yet schools still have not adapted to the new context of information abundance. The whole of humanity’s knowledge is instantly available to anyone with a smartphone. Today’s challenge is not a dearth of information but a cacophony of excess. Instead of students who retain knowledge, what we need now are students with emotional skills, such as the street smarts to know when they are being hustled, whether by lawless scammers, insincere politicians, or dubious corporate interests. Even more so, we need the schools to produce empathetic citizens with an intrinsic motivation to defend peace and democracy.

So the question is not, “How can we fit mental health around the goal of instruction?” but, “How can we fit instruction around the goal of mental health?” We will start to see a decline in violence when on-campus therapy is as commonplace as math class, instructional minutes are dwarfed by minutes of play, and when school administrators retain or lose their positions not due to students’ test scores, but their ability to function cooperatively in society.