Maybe We Should Abandon “Whole Child Education”

Approach “shifts away from simply targeting academic achievements and instead promotes the overall well-being of a child”

But academic achievement is falling and the kids aren’t well.

 There’s “a growing movement to encourage schools to refocus their educational efforts in a way that takes a ‘whole child approach,’” the N.C. Public School Forum wrote in 2018. “This approach shifts away from simply targeting a child’s academic achievements and instead promotes the overall well-being of a child and considers ways to improve his or her physical and emotional health as well.”

Five years later, academic achievement is at a 40-year low and teenage depression is at an all-time high.

Do COVID and school closure policies bear blame for cratering test scores? Yes. Is social media and smart phone use a big contributor to teenage depression? Almost certainly.

But the question before policymakers and educators is: What role does school play in resolving these problems?

It seems a fair proposition to us that schools should play a central role in addressing learning loss, and maybe not a central role in trying to resolve every other problem in a child’s life.

Schools are awful substitutes for homes. Even the best teacher or school counselor can’t fix inattentive parenting, nor can they fix mental health issues. Could it be that by focusing on a student’s social/emotional health and basic learning, schools are failing at both?

We don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s worth asking.

We’re not suggesting school psychologists and counselors shouldn’t be there when a child is in need, or that schools shouldn’t continue striving to offer healthy food options.

But the collective attention of the education bureaucracy may well be spread too thin. School is a place a child goes for 6-7 hours per day, and to us the overriding focus of that time should be reading, writing, math, science, and history.

We don’t think we can expect teachers to be educators and social workers and therapists and mediators and substitute parents all at once.

Test scores are collapsing. Focus on that part first.