Joyless Endeavors

A 'cult of rigor' has turned the notion of making kids happy into a negative, an education critic argues.

By Alfie Kohn

Why are our schools not places of joy?” This question, posed exactly 20 years ago by John Goodlad, founder of the Center for Educational Renewal, was both a summary of his landmark study of American classrooms and a plea for his readers to realize that a place called School didn’t have to be as bleak as it was.

Today things are different, of course. Today we rarely even ask the question.

That so few children seem to take pleasure from what they’re doing on a given weekday morning, that the default emotional state in classrooms seems to alternate between anxiety and boredom, doesn’t even alarm us. Worse yet, when happiness does make an appearance in schools, educators may feel obliged to apologize for it. After all, they wouldn’t want to be accused of...