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Schools play an odd role in society. They fulfill many different functions for many different people, but perhaps their most important function is to provide an environment of learning. However, there is a fundamental (and irreversible) flaw to schools that inhibit the level of learning that can occur within their walls. What is this flaw?

School is not real.

School is only a simulation.

I think of it this way: school is like practice, but life experience is the real thing. We have students who graduate from high school and college after 22 years of practice, but they have never played a real or meaningful game in their life. They come onto the playing field confused, awkward, and uncertain of who they are because they haven’t played a game. They have sat through lecture after lecture, lab after lab, simulation after simulation, but they still haven’t had an experience of real value. They haven’t created from their knowledge and haven’t taken ownership of the experience.

School is not real. If school was real, we wouldn’t call it “school”. We would call it “experience”. These days, having experience is the new “Graduated with Honors”.

While I think this is an irreversible flaw of schools, the best teachers are those who reduce the chasm between what happens in their classrooms and what happens in real life. I can still remember my senior government class in which we simulated Congress and we all had to research and then be a member of congress. We formed committees, wrote and voted on bills, formed amendments, and functioned like Congress, all over the span of two weeks. I learned more about government in those two weeks than I have in the rest of my life. However, it should be obvious that this wasn’t the real thing. It was only a simulation. I don’t think I’m quite ready to step into D.C. and start running things.

This is why, for everyone, the world should be their classroom. Only by analyzing the “real thing” can you truly come to know and understand a topic. Schools can spark interest, teach essential details, and help build confidence, but they are not real. They are only a simulation. And to be truly educated, and to truly learn, you have to study the real thing. You have to touch it, breathe it, and live it. You have not learned something until you have experienced it.

Fortunately, schools are starting to understand that the world is a classroom. There has been an explosion in internships and project-based learning in which students interact with real situations that have real consequences. This will only produce better-prepared, and more-engaged, students who are ready to shine like all-stars when they leave school.

I was on a plane a few weeks ago, and a kid was sitting next to me who had just dropped out of high school. He wanted to become an electrician, so he just transferred to a trade school where he can become a certified electrician by the age of 19. He said, “School just wasn’t for me. I hated class, but I’m already making more money than all my friends, I have a car that I paid for with cash, and I didn’t have to go into $100,000 in debt to do it.” This is one VERY smart kid.

I’m glad that there are people like this still in the world, a person who understands that the most important thing is to get out of school and to go experience something. Because once you experience it, your learning shoots off the charts in a way that no class, no PowerPoint, and no lecture could ever accomplish. And I like things that shoot off the charts.

I think there is great value in a simulation. There is great value in “practice”, but we spend way too much time in school, in the simulation, before actually playing the game. We need to stop nurturing our children in incubators of simulation and let them out into the wild world and go make a positive impact, because if you keep the child in the simulation for too long, they won’t know how to function outside of it. How much time do you spend reading the directions and following instructions before you jump in to play a game? If you are like me (and the other 6 billion people on this planet), you probably don’t spend much time at all. You just go and play the game, and you learn all the rules and instructions while you are playing. We need to provide more opportunities for our students to play the game than to just tell them the rules and provide simulations.

There is much talk about school reform, and many people are looking for educational models that will best-promote learning. However, every single one of these models has a fundamental flaw: school is not real. There is no substitute for experience, and you can’t ask school to do something that, by its very nature, cannot do: provide authentic experience.

In John Taylor Gatto’s Teacher-of-the-Year acceptance speech, he said, “I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 25 years of teaching — that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes... It’s not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it’s just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.” Bingo.