I work in education.

These passive aggressive kids who try to dismantle the class need to be removed from good students. People online demand that teachers be like part superhero, part hilarious talk show host they don’t realize how exhausting it is to hold back 20-30 kids day after day for that one kid or group who hate going to school and only want to ruin the day for everyone else.

We can all admit that there are some toxic people at the office yet to suggest as much with children is heavily frowned upon. I now have a live and let live approach to these specific kids. They can waste time, zone out, even chat with their buddies but as soon as they cross the line into bothering someone else then I must intervene.

It’s really difficult to make everyone happy. It’s so wild to me how some kids will love me while others will view me as like some kind of antagonist in a Charles Dickens story no matter how much I try to win them over. They just don’t want to be there.

But maybe the fact that some kids can pay attention for 6 hours has made us as a society expect that kids should be able to pay attention for 6 hours and that the ones who can't are somehow deficient. Perhaps this is to everyone's detriment and the optimal solution for education for everyone is not the classroom model.

I think your stance is completely faulty. Children aren't sent to 6-8 hours of school a day because it was discovered that some subset of them liked it and we decided to just implement it across the board.

We decided as a society that not only is education valuable for people, it's a human right. So we, as a society, have failed if we fail to provide an education for our children.

Many children don't like going to school. Some subset of children wind up acting out in a ton of different ways, but often it is disruptive to classes and wastes a ton of time. Their actions have a direct negative impact on the children who actually want to attend classes and learn. But education is the right of everyone, even children who actively resist school, so we don't remove them.

I get the point you're trying to make, that maybe our children would benefit more from just being allowed to be children, to be rowdy and play with friends, have freedom and activity instead of hours of lessons per day sitting in a chair. I get that. I even agree with it to a point.

But it's extremely asinine to suggest that somehow this is the fault of the well behaved kids or the kids who genuinely love school.

I'm not saying it's their fault, I'm saying that their ability to participate fully may have led educators to think that their peers who cannot do so are deficient, rather than that the education process itself could be improved so everyone can fully participate in it.