Towards a more integral system of education

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 22 November 2025

NEW — revision in progress

Is traditional schooling injurious to health?
The implicit curriculum and its relation to mental health§

Introduction

Educational theories and policies tend to include noble and inspiring ideals regarding "all-round development" of the students. The practice lives, however, rarely up to the intent. More often than not, the content of the curriculum and the manner in which it is transacted are such, that a negative effect on the healthy development of the students is almost inevitable. Children all over the world tend to spend a considerable part of their day in schools, and there are many good reasons why this is almost universally considered a good thing. Schooling is, however, not an unmixed blessing. There are many aspects of school life that can hardly be considered conducive to the healthy development of either child, teacher or the society at large. This chapter attends to some of these factors, and suggests the direction in which a solution might be found.

We'll have a look at some of the main issues that arise, but before we start, it is good to be clear about the limits of the following critique. The first is that there are students who don't experience any of these difficulties. They are those who happen to have a mindset that simply fits this set-up. They like the mental challenges the system offers them, work hard, have satisfying results, are liked by the teachers and get positive appraisals. They form an important group, because it is from their ranks that the next generation of teachers and academics arise, but there are only few of them. The following is about what the system does to all the "others". The second is that there is no accusation of ill-will on the side of the teachers or the administrators. In many ways, everybody involved is the victim of a civilization that has gone off the road in its uncritical pursuit of objectivity and its far too mechanical understanding of equality. We have setup a system of education that treats children too much as objects, and that's plain wrong. What we need instead is high quality subjectivity, and an equal respect for all us in our being different.

Pathogenic aspects of the implicit school curriculum

It is often said that what really matters in education is what remains once you’ve forgotten all they have tried to teach you. In its absoluteness, this is no doubt an exaggeration, but it is hard to overestimate the influence of what is known as the implicit curriculum: what children learn from the educational context, from the way the explicit curriculum is transacted. The effect from the educational environment is bound to be strong, if only because it hardly differs from year to year, or from subject to subject: It exerts more or less the same influence during each and every class, each and every day, each and every year a child goes to school. Given how many hours children spend in school, and how much importance they and their parents attach to this attendance, schools are thus rather likely to play a major role in “building the character” of the students. The question is, however, whether the type of character schools build is what the individual and the society really need. To get some grip on this question, we’ll look in the first part of this chapter at what Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson (1967) called the pragmatics of communication. In other words, we’ll look at what happens to children when they attend school, not from an ideal or formal perspective, but from a pragmatic, psychological one.

The difficulties with what one could call the “standard school environment” are quite well known. They have been described with great insight over fifty years ago by authors like Ivan Illich (1971) and John Holt (1964). It is also true that at least in some countries nursery and primary schools do not follow this pattern any longer. But it is still holding out elsewhere1, and its effects are likely to haunt humanity for many years to come. We'll have a quick look at them.

The traditional classroom layout

Many of them arise directly out of the typical classroom layout.

Figure 1. Neatly Ordered Desks

It is such a classic, with such widespread acceptance, that virtually every educated human being will immediately recognise Figures 1and 2 as a classroom: each child behind a small desk, the desks neatly ordered in rows, the teacher in front.

Figure 2. Lines of Vision

As Figure 2 shows, the arrangement allows (almost) all students to see the teacher, and the teacher, walking a little to the left and right, can keep an eye on every child. If education had been nothing but instruction, or learning nothing but a purely individual, intellectual exercise, all would have been well. And it is true that this set-up does work quite well for certain aspects of college-level education. But in primary education, it is different. Here the main things that need to be developed are basic life-skills and there is no way these can be developed in an arrangement like this; on the contrary.

Lack of respect for individual differences

The problems with the standard classroom layout arise mainly from the simple fact that it is not at all natural for children to spend their days sitting quietly behind little desks. The most visible victims of this arrangement are the increasing numbers of children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As society, we diagnose the problem "objectively" as a chemical deviation in the brain of a certain percentage of children that, as such, can be treated with drugs, while all we actually know is that there is a disharmony between what certain children need and the environment we provide. It stands to reason that the vast majority of such children would have been fine if they had received a bit more individual attention, care and scope for physical activity.2 The difficulties are, however, not limited to this increasing yet still relatively small group. The enforced uniformity affects all children, and they seem to be due primarily to the antagonism that arises almost intrinsically between on the one side the children, who are forced to do what they don’t like, and on the other side the teachers, who are responsible for imposing the system. This antagonism forms the unpleasant backdrop for several educational practices that are bound to have a negative impact on the mental health of whole generations of human beings.

Promoting antisocial attitudes.

The next and perhaps strangest thing about the standard classroom layout is that it inhibits communication between the students. Even when in a more economical arrangement students are grouped in twos on every bench, communication between them is still looked at as a disturbance, and, on many occasions, as cheating. In other words, to the extent that the students are obedient and conform to the system, they will learn to consider their peers (and to some extent even themselves) primarily as a potential source of conflict and disturbance. This is a highly peculiar, antisocial attitude towards self and others, and hardly something any well-meaning educationist would like to foster, but this is the attitude that flows naturally from the basic, physical set-up. The need to communicate with others is a very deep-rooted and irrepressible part of the human character. So suppressing this need for too many hours a day leaves children in a permanent state of inner conflict and unease, a state in which they have to be always on their guard, distrusting their own and their peers’ natural impulses. It is not hard to recognise traces of this unease in the adult population.

If a student does not accept this negative view of himself and his friends, he has very few options: the only simple way to stay loyal and close to his peers is to defy in one way or another the authority of the teacher. In other words, given the conflict that is built into the situation, the child can only remain socially connected by siding with the authority or by ganging up with the other kids against it. These are hardly attitudes the educational system can be happy to promote; and yet it does.

Competing for secondary gains: A corruption of the will.

The traditional classroom set-up has another negative effect that has far-reaching consequences. The child has little to look forward to in the standard arrangement except for whatever little warmth and appreciation he or she can elicit from the teacher. The teacher, who has a large group of children to motivate, will be inclined to present this appreciation as a scarce commodity the students have to compete for. For the sake of convenience and “objectivity”, this appreciation then tends to get formalised as grades. As a result, children learn, systematically, during virtually every minute of their school-going life, to compete with their peers for the scarce and purely symbolic commodity of “top grades”, or, if they know they cannot manage this, at least for grades that are considered “sufficient”. In other words, they learn to do whatever the system demands in fierce competition with others, and in total disregard of more natural, more human sources of happiness and satisfaction. It is worth standing still for a moment and contemplate the all-pervasive, corrupting influence this has on society.

Training passivity

A quality that is exceedingly difficult to cultivate in the traditional classroom arrangement is individual initiative. Power, control and initiative are so completely centralised in the teacher, that even a well-meaning teacher can hardly create space for individual students to initiate their own work. Unfortunate as this is in its own right, it also has several untoward and entirely unnecessary consequences.

Training to waste time.

The most well known difficulty is that the uniform arrangement of the benches in the classroom makes it difficult for teachers to offer different assignments to students with different interests, learning styles and levels of capacity. Yet, if the teacher is incapable of providing worthwhile activities for different students at the same time, many of them will find it hard to find anything worthwhile to do. The less gifted children will learn to spend their time in an overwhelming, threatening environment, which they can neither understand nor control. The more gifted students will get bored, and as they can be rudely interrupted any time, they will find it safer to play silly games, than to do whatever they’re really interested in doing. Being stumped or playing meaningless games to pass time can hardly be habits teachers would like children to develop, yet this is exactly what the system encourages.

Attempting the impossible.

Interestingly even within the narrow range of behaviour that is both constructive and compliant, the scope for developing useful mental capacities and mental skills is small. If a teacher leaves half the period for student responses, and if there are less than 30 students in the class—and in most countries these are completely unrealistic conditions—each student can still hardly expect to speak for more than one minute during a one-hour period. Yet, active engagement is crucial for effective learning, and for language learning, the need to speak is essential. If a language is taught only during one period a day, then a-minute-a-period means a-minute-a-day, and this is obviously not enough to acquire mastery. As a consequence, in a traditional classroom setup there is simply no realistic possibility for children to learn a language that is not already spoken—and spoken well—at home. The same difficulty mars effective learning of many other skills or mental capacities a school is supposed to teach. Especially when student–teacher ratios are high (in Indian Government schools it is often 60:1) most of the actual learning has then to take place outside school hours with the help of parents and tutors, in other words, in situations where the student–teacher ratios are much, much smaller: a development which seriously hinders the aim of socio-economic equality which compulsory universal schooling is supposed to serve.

One, fixed syllabus

Inhibiting the ability to make choices and take responsibility.

In spite of what well-intentioned educationists and administrators may claim and hope for, and in spite of all the efforts individual teachers may make, the traditional education system, as a system, is still solidly syllabus-centred. Individuals and whole administrations may do their level best to introduce more activity-based learning and child-centred education, but in practice, teachers are still duty-bound to “transact the curriculum”, and they are judged on how well the students master its content. The way what happens in schools tends to be defined in terms of content is an almost bizarre remnant from a past that doesn't exist anymore. It came from a time that children had no access to knowledge that wasn't already present in their community, so they needed besides the three r's a whole gamut of basic 'facts' that some designated group of specialists considered crucial. The ease with which we can now access such information electronically has made this focus on memorising a fixed bit of factual information almost entirely superfluous. There is still some place for it, but it is really small. What is far more important is that childen develop the skills and attitudes needed to find, judge, share and apply knowledge in a beautiful, loving harmony with others.

Evaluation

Teaching uncritical narrow-mindedness.

This pressure in the direction of opportunism is greatly reinforced by "continuous evaluation". The fact that children are continuously judged on criteria that are not of their own making conveys at least two implicit messages: (a) There is, according ot the system, a clearly defined right and a wrong way of thinking and doing things, which is implied by the fact that if this were not the case, the entire evaluation process would lose its meaning and validity; (b) What is right and what is wrong cannot be determined by the student but is decided either by the teachers or by “the system”, something rather vague and unaccountable that’s even above their teachers.3 It is hard to accept that blind faith in “higher-ups” and “the system” is an acceptable outcome of a sane system of education. And when children realise this and do not believe what the teachers say, they are likely to lose trust in academics as a whole, inclusive those areas in which science actually does have its act together.

There is another, more subtle problem with the imposition of a fixed syllabus. Teachers often ask questions to their students. These questions, however, are only rarely genuine questions in the sense that the teacher doesn’t know the answer to his own question. Teachers are taught to ask, as much as possible, open-ended questions. Yet, even when they do so, these seemingly “open questions” are hardly ever about something that is genuinely open to a variety of different answers. Almost always, the teacher knows the “correct” answer beforehand and asks the question only to check whether the students can produce that specific answer. This can create for the students a number of difficult dilemmas, for which only few can always find a constructive answer.

The nature of the dilemma depends on whether the question is about facts or opinions. The border between facts and opinions is, however, fluid, and to quite an extent a matter of attitude. Some people live in a world where almost everything is definite and well defined this way or that. Others live in a much more fluid world where “it all depends”. For most children, the difference is clear—there are things that are straightforward, like maths and geography, and other areas, like values, socio-economic structures, relationships and feelings, where it is far more difficult to be sure of what is “right” and what is “wrong”.

Training underperformance

When the question is “factual”, in the sense that there actually is, or at least seems to be one clearly correct answer, the situation is still comparatively simple. John Holt has described with great perspicuity what happens in such situations. Those children who are considered bright by the teacher—and by themselves—make a genuine attempt at producing the right answer. They trust that even if they get it wrong, they will still be treated with respect on the basis of their standing reputation. John Holt observed that in fact, such students are often given a second chance. Those children, however, who are considered dumb by the teacher—and often by themselves—cannot trust at all that they will be treated so generously. They have, first of all, a greater chance of making a mistake, and they suspect, often correctly, that if they get it wrong, they will be derided in front of the whole class. Doing your best and then losing can be pretty frustrating, so they are tempted to avoid the risk. They tend to try this first by getting at the correct answer by stealth, and if this doesn’t work, they may give, on purpose, a wrong answer. The incorrect answer does of course guarantee defeat, but the shame of the defeat is compensated for by the satisfaction of having been in charge of the entire chain of events leading to it. Though the teacher has the apparent victory, the student knows that behind the scene, it is the student who has pulled the strings. Making such negative choices is obviously disastrous for the intellectual growth of the child, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is fairly common. Once this habit has established itself in a child, it is not hard to imagine how easily this habit can invade other areas of life and how disastrous the results can be.4

Training opportunism: A corruption of the mind.

When the answers do not have one factual answer, the situation gets more complex. The question that then arises is what the child should do when the answer that comes up in her own mind differs from the one the teacher expects. If the child is very clever, she can keep the two separate by giving the teacher what he expects while remembering and treasuring her own answer. This is however rare, and the few children who manage it tend to come from homes where they get full support from their parents to keep up their own individuality. For most children this is not the case, and so they are faced with an existential dilemma. If they stick to their own answer, they are in trouble because most teachers assume that answers that differ from those in the textbook are wrong, and that children who give those "wrong" answers must be recalcitrant, stubborn, uncooperative or simply unintelligent. For most students, compliance is thus far more likely to lead to attractive results, and so the vast majority of them gives in, and tries to answer what the teacher wants to hear. Now this is once more far more nefarious than it may look at first sight, for what happens is somewhat similar to what happens when evaluation is used as motivator: the child is trained to suppress his innate need to distinguish for himself what is true and false (since that gets him into trouble) and ape whatever the authorities tell him to assert whether he believes it or not. Since this goes on and on every single day during all his formative years he is rather likely to lose the very ability to find out what is true and what is not. In other words, the child is trained systematically to suppress what he thinks is true, for the sake of what is profitable. And, once again, is that really what education should do?

In short, when evaluation is used as motivator, the corruption that takes place has its effect twice: first on the motivation to act, and second on the mental skills and processes needed to choose what to do. There is a corruption of both, of the will and of the mind. In other words, there is then not only the subversion of a child’s natural eagerness to learn, but there is also a direct attack on the child’s willingness, and subsequently ability, for impartial judgment of his own actions. It is hard to be honest if there is too much self-interest at stake...

To summarize...

To summarize the argument so far, the traditional classroom arrangement in combination with a fixed syllabus and continuous evaluation stands in the way of children learning how to build constructive relationships, how to respect differences between people, how to feel at ease with themselves and others, how to recognise their own and others’ strengths, how to pool these for a good common cause, how to make their own value judgements and work constructively and happily together with others towards some meaningful end.

What comes instead depends on the ability of the student. In the weaker students, it encourages underperformance, a disdain for science and intellectuals in general, and a general unwillingness to think and acr constructively on their own. For a small group in the middle, who happen to think like their teachers, it works just fine. They do their best, get trained well, and are amply rewarded for their efforts. The most intelligent ones are taught how to waste time, look down on the others, squiggle out private time as much as they can, and pursue their own ends. In all students it breeds opportunism and a tendency to work for secondary gain.

One could well argue that this is a caricature, and that good teachers can manage to create an atmosphere of cooperation and common purpose even in a traditional classroom. This is no doubt true, but to the extent that this succeeds, it is an individual achievement, which is brought about in spite of the system. The factors mentioned above still play their antisocial and pathogenic role as undercurrents inherent in the rest of the system.5 It doesn't require much imagination to realise how fast education — and society — would become more harmonious and beautiful if the good teachers were more widely supported and encouraged to share their attitude and way of working with others.

We will have a look at what could be done about all this in the next section of this chapter.

Endnotes