The Real "Real World"

“That’s how it is in the real world.”

A sentence that people use to justify all sorts of educational practices (most of which I happen to disagree with, for what it’s worth) - not allowing students to redo assignments or turn in late work, punishing them for not bringing a pencil to class, separating them into leveled groups based on (perceived) ability. And there certainly is an interesting discussion to be had about whether the best way to prepare young people for things that are unpleasant in the “real world” is by subjecting them to those things as soon as possible. (Alfie Kohn says no.) But I want to bring up a different point: in many cases, that is not how it works in the real world.

For instance, if I get a bad evaluation from my supervisor, am I fired on the spot? Or am I given specific, constructive feedback and given an opportunity to improve my performance? In every job I’ve ever had or known anyone to have, it has been the latter. And that includes both minimum-wage jobs and my current professional career. But so often we hold students to a different standard - they must get things right the first time or else it doesn’t count. They get a failing grade on an assignment or a test and they just have deal with it.

Or let’s imagine you have been working on an important project at work and are having trouble meeting the deadline. Only the most exacting of bosses (or average bosses under exceptional circumstances, I suppose) would refuse to accept it a moment late or do something dramatic like take your weeks of work and throw it into the garbage without even reading it. Most employers, most of the time, would be willing to compromise, give you a little bit more time to complete the task. They might not be especially thrilled about it, but they would do it. Because on the whole, they would rather see you complete the project than not do it at all.

And yet, when a teacher even considers doing this for a student, he or she is instantly derided as “coddling” the student or “doing them a disservice by failing to hold them accountable.” (Both accusations that have been leveled, indirectly, at me throughout my short tenure in education.) But there is a balance to be struck between learning lessons about accountability and, you know, learning. We must recognize that, when we overemphasize things like deadlines, other things are going to suffer as a result. Too often, I think teachers are willing to sacrifice students’ learning

This guy is not the model of a good teacher.

opportunities for the sake of “making a point” about the real world - which, incidentally, does not even apply to most places in the real world.

The same line is also used to defend tracking, the process of putting students into different groups based on their (perceived) ability levels. But where in the real world does that happen? We don’t live in a caste system; as prescient as Aldous Huxley was in some ways, we do not divide our society into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons like they do in Brave New World. Sure, we do have divisions of class, but they are much more complex and nuanced than a strict division into discrete groups. Socioeconomic mobility is still possible (though of course it might not be as common as we’d like it to be.)

And I don’t know of any workplaces where workers are actually divided up into different groups based on their performance. Maybe in the short-term, as part of some sort of incentive program, but not permanently. It kind of sounds like something Michael Scott would try on The Office, only to have it backfire spectacularly. And I suspect that any business (or other workplace) that did try to do something like that would probably meet with opposition - and that one of the chief arguments against it would be that it was “treating them like children.” And yet we do it to children under the supposition that it is how they will be treated like adults.

I am reminded of how, every single year in school, we were told that the teachers in the next grade “wouldn’t tolerate this kind of stuff.” In fourth grade, they insisted that the fifth-grade teachers wouldn’t accept late work; in fifth grade, they said the same thing about middle school. In middle school, high school; in high school, college. But they always did. There was a gradual progression of higher expectations, of course, and some individual teachers were stricter than others - but we never quite reached that promised “never." In fact, it seemed like college professors were overall more willing to be lenient than high school teachers had been.

I'm literally both of these at the same time.

And now that I have been living in the “real world” for a couple of years, I can attest that it is even more applicable here than it ever was in school. Everyone I work for (and with) is willing to make compromises. They will listen to my explanations if I fail to get something done or meet their expectations; no one ever barks “No excuses!” They treat me like, you know, a person. And maybe I'm being too optimistic here, but I really don't think that's all that rare.

I used to work with a guy who was five minutes late to work pretty much every time he had a shift. And yes, it was annoying, but gradually we grew to tolerate it because once he was there, he was a pretty good worker and we couldn’t afford to lose him. If that particular business were run like a school, though, he would have been written up, punished, chastised every single time. And I doubt it would have made much of a difference; his lateness was not deliberate, just the result of something-or-other always “coming up.” All it would have done was make him angry and resentful - and hurt his job performance.

The only “real world” that these inflexible, zero-tolerance attitudes prepare anyone for is the impersonal world of other institutions. Walmart; prison; the military. And certainly some students will end up working in places whose rules and expectations make school seem lax in comparison, but not all of them. Some of them - maybe even most of them - will go on to places that are more reasonable, more flexible, more respectful of them as individuals than schools ever were. So why aren’t we doing more to prepare them for that real world?