Today’s schools can be silencing places for many students, especially for students that may stand out from the crowd. Everyone is searching for a place to fit in; a place to belong. Throughout elementary school students are given opportunities to shine and to excel at a wide variety of tasks. They are taught the value of creativity and we as adults celebrate the smallest accomplishments as monumental milestones in their lives. As these young children grow, those opportunities for praise and excellence become fewer and fewer. The rise of a testing culture in our schools devalues creativity and student’s value becomes based on the answers they bubble in on a scantron. This experience of education often does not provide opportunities for students to feel engaged or connected to their educations in a meaningful way. The higher the grade the more funneled the view of success becomes and we increasingly leave students on the sidelines.

This funneling and disengagement happens at a time when students are more and more ruled by the part of their brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is deeply tied to our emotional response to situations and assists in memory imprinting based on this emotional response. It plays a role in the rapid emotional reactions that we see in adolescents. This period of middle school and high school is challenging. They don’t feel as though they belong anywhere or that anyone understands them. They are searching for their own identity and attempting to find ways to connect to the world. The lack of connection at school, the feeling that their teachers don’t care or that their classmates are “phony” prevails but also sends them into a downward mental spiral. It is much easier for students middle school and high school age to think about themselves negatively than it is for them to think about themselves positively and once they begin to practice negative self-talk, the amygdala kicks in and helps them imprint those negative reactions in connection to school or the educational environment.

Decreased connection to school, increased quest to fit in and decreased opportunities to be affirmed or to excel combined with temperaments ruled by emotional response, provides a volatile cocktail for students. We see the results in the increases in bullying and other negative behavior in schools and communities. New technologies mean that bullying no longer ends at the schoolyard gates but follows students home on their cell phones, emails, and facebook pages. The interactions between students become more anonymous and we see the use and creation of sites like Juicy Campus to terrorize other students. In the last year there have been increased suicides of very young children that were caused by students feeling so persecuted by other students bullying them. Schools have reacted to the negative behavior by increasing disciplinary sanctions, by banning any sort of touching in schools, by freezing facebook and other online sites so they cannot be used in the school. All of these are band-aid solutions. None of them address the underlying issues: loss of student voice, disengagement from the educational experince and general lack of belonging or space in schools.

# posted by Terry Chausse, Practice Manager @ 2:28 PM