Schooling Isn't Enough
Diminished language became diminished expectations
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Someone left a comment on something I wrote recently. I had defined what I believe to be the real purpose of school: to produce independent thinkers who can articulate ideas clearly, write with conviction, read widely, follow curiosity, navigate disagreement, and build the kind of creative adaptability that makes them capable of surviving whatever life actually looks like, so that students will become productive, engaged citizens of the world, no matter their occupation. He responded to me simply, “You are describing an education, not schooling. Those are two very different things.”
I turned that comment over and over in my head, and it kept coming back.
It eventually made me angry, because I had never once considered them separate. “Schooling” is a weak definition of an education. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the moment we accept smaller language, we endorse lower expectations, and everyone starts to act accordingly. Schools. Teachers. Parents. Policymakers. All of us.
Words have immense power. Call it schooling, and the focus is on attendance, compliance, facts, figures, and a passing grade. Call it education, and we are talking about a human life, about who a person becomes, how they think, about what they carry forward into every room they will ever enter after they leave ours. An education is alive, and we must collaborate with it. It changes and grows and pushes and pulls and guides us forever. And this isn’t just semantics. Words define the world. The words we choose to describe our experiences, our days, our work, cultivate our reality. We know this. We’ve heard it ad nauseam. And yet we keep accepting the safer definitions, the ones that let us off the hook.
My definition of the job didn’t arrive all at once. It expanded as I did, as a person and as an educator. What I know is that the job becomes humdrum and pointless if we don’t make it matter. I help students see value in what we do, and let them explore what they’re passionate about, so they repeatedly practice real skills. Checking boxes is an inadequate goal when we are talking about learning or growing up.
The fracture didn’t happen overnight. It got inserted into policy. No Child Left Behind started the lowering of standards en masse. Every Student Succeeds continued in that vein. Schools cannot hold students back when they don’t meet the mark. The stakes are gone. Teacher judgment, backed by evidence from real classroom labor, has been replaced with policy written by people who have never stood in front of thirty-two teenagers at seven in the morning.
The consequences extend beyond students. Language doesn’t just shape how we think about children. It frames how we think about teachers, too.
If school exists merely to supervise children, deliver content, and move students through a system, then teachers become little more than caretakers who carry out instructions, which fails to honestly represent the work.
A curriculum is not a script, and benchmarks are not lessons. They are destinations. The teacher’s job is to make thousands of decisions that breathe life into those ideas for a room full of unique human beings. Two professionals can take the same standard embedded in the same unit and create entirely different learning experiences. Both can be effective, but they will absolutely be different.
This is why teachers require advanced degrees. We are not trained to follow directions. We are trained to exercise judgment minute by minute. We have to understand how learning occurs, anticipate misconceptions, explain difficult ideas clearly, adjust when a lesson falls apart, build relationships, and earn trust. We constantly make choices that cannot be scripted because the people in front of us are not interchangeable, as much as the government wants that to be true.
Still, discourse about teaching implies that anyone could do it with the right packet and pacing guide. Society has demoted teachers to babysitters and learning to content coverage. Education got flattened to schooling, and eventually, we started living the language we chose.
Students were told for years that the guideline was enough. The last column on the rubric is true success, but the thing is, it didn’t encourage striving for excellence. Students learned over time that showing up is the same as trying. And they believed us because we said it with policy and grades and passed them along with a gradebook full of Fs. Why would anyone give more than what the system asked of them when the system never pushed for more?
Everything has a hidden cost. Schooling yields people who know how to fall in line. Education graduates people who know how to think, adapt, lead, and care about the quality of their work. Right now, we form a lot of the first kind and yearn for the second.
If we keep consenting to definitions that shrink our vision down to something measurable and safe, we will keep producing people who were never invited to be anything more than average and subservient.
Subservient does not change the world.
The difference between schooling and education isn’t abstract. I have felt it in the room. Schooling is default living, and education is soulful intentionality. Students have to see the threads you’ve chosen and why. They have to feel the deliberateness. And when they do, something shifts. It’s not unlike church. There is an ease and an intention that takes hold. When a student shares something vulnerable or stands up and makes an emboldened speech about the water crisis in Flint or the need for free healthcare, the room changes, and a deep reverence emerges. Time feels nonexistent. The mind slows. Everything has more detail. A collective flow state. The class flies by, but the resonance endures long after the bell.
When it isn’t there, the class drones for what feels like hours. Tedious. Students push back, and behavior issues emerge. Busy work stifles it and replaces purpose with completion. Eliminate the busy work, and you move the needle that actually matters.
My student Easton changed his own mind this year while working through his thesis. He stopped mid draft and said, “I actually don’t think I believe this anymore after writing with evidence and all that. Can I adjust it?”
I said, “Okay, what do you actually believe?” He proceeded to articulate the most focused, arguable thesis about the importance of coaching I had heard from a student all year. We wrote it down verbatim. He finished the draft in forty-five minutes. When there is genuine conviction behind the writing, it feels easier, but it challenges them radically because they become conscious in real time of their beliefs, their values, and what they thought mattered but actually doesn’t so much.
Shakespeare said “nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” We assign meaning. And we can teach kids to do that, too. But the idea that schooling and education are separate is dangerous because it gives people the excuse to do less. Enter time fillers, worksheets, movie days, and a disjointed curriculum that bores everyone into believing school doesn’t matter, even teachers. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and kills the good parts. It isn’t enough.
I still think about my former student Gigi. She came to me as a sophomore, apologizing every time she asked a question.
I finally told her to stop.
“Asking for help is your right, and it is my job to help you. Every time you apologize for needing something, you sell yourself short.”
She kept asking questions. Eventually, I told her she needed to trust herself more than she trusted me.
“Listen to your instincts. I will look at it when you think it’s done.”
I encouraged her to join debate and take a public speaking course because I was honest about what she needed to improve upon. She did both.
Over the next few years, she transformed. She started a nonprofit. She spoke before the school board. She became the kind of person who walked toward difficult conversations instead of away from them.
She’s at Cornell now.
At her honors ceremony, she chose me to hood her. She told me I taught her to stop apologizing for what she needed and deserved.
I didn’t create her confidence. I didn’t get her to Cornell. She got herself there.
I just refused to let her believe she was smaller than she was.
A genuine education happens when we are honest with students about what they need. They listen. They apply. They do what it takes. They flourish. And it is available to every student sitting in every classroom right now, if we decide it is.
So what is the point of any of it if we don’t take this seriously?
That is not a rhetorical question. I want an answer. Because if we can’t agree that school is supposed to light something in a person that burns long after they’ve left the building, then why are any of us here?
A true education is the backbone of a functioning society. It is also its best source of hope. Where a person learns to think, to question, to connect across difference, to change their own mind when the evidence demands it. When we gut that, we don’t just create worse workers. We produce worse neighbors. Worse voters. Worse parents. A society that has forgotten how to think is a society that is very easy to mislead.
We can do better than that.
As always, take good notes.
Where have you seen education—not just schooling—change someone's life? Tell me in the comments, or discuss it over a glass of wine with your teacher friends.
If you enjoyed this piece, read:
The Case For Being a Teacher
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What is School For?
After years in the classroom, reading research obsessively, trying things that worked and things that absolutely didn’t, there is no consensus on what “right” teaching looks like because we cannot even agree on what school is for. There are methods that photograph well. Methods that satisfy administrators. Methods that make…
"The moment we accept smaller language, we endorse lower expectations." A wonderful piece to come across this Saturday afternoon. The schooling vs. education distinction isn't semantic — it's the difference between compliance and a human life. I've been writing about exactly this tension: what we inherit by default versus what we actually believe learning is for. If it resonates: thesanctuaryko.substack.com/p/roots-wings-and-the-current
Molly, this distinction you’re drawing between “schooling” and “education” is exactly what we see play out in the lives of the kids and families we walk alongside. When school is reduced to supervision, content delivery, and compliance, it produces young people who know how to fall in line, not young people who know how to think, adapt, or carry conviction into the rooms they’ll inhabit for the rest of their lives.
The line that will stay with us longest is that “the moment we accept smaller language, we endorse lower expectations, and everyone starts to act accordingly”. That’s not just semantics. It’s policy, practice, and culture. In our world, where children of incarcerated parents are often treated as boxes to be checked off a risk list, the difference between schooling and education can literally be the difference between a life that narrows and a life that opens. Your insistence that school should light something in a person that burns long after they’ve left the building is the standard every student deserves. We appreciate you.