The head of the Baltimore school system, Andres Alonso, is fond of saying this:
Kids come as is and it’s our job to engage them.
I couldn’t agree more. In Totto-Chan, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi described meeting the headmaster of her new school. They had a conversation lasting hours. She remembered it as the most anyone had ever listened to her.
The full English title of Totto-Chan is Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window. “At the window” is a Japanese term for failure — businessmen judged incompetent were seated near the window. At her previous school, Kuroyanagi had been a misfit and expelled — for, among other things, opening and closing her desk too often.
I agree that, to the extent that it’s possible, schools should try to engage their students. However, kids vary in which subjects they find inherently engaging, and they also vary with regard to the degree that they can find ANYTHING engaging. I’ve taken many classes that were less-than-enthralling at the time, but which ended up being valuable to me anyway.