Accidentally Academic

In a perfect world, school curriculum would include interesting, relevant and useful lessons that would inspire students to learn, develop and seek more education.

But, alas, we live on Earth where perfect exists only in our imagination. As anyone who has ever been to school knows, a lot of what's taught there is boring, irrelevant and useless.

The result? Kids hate school. They hate it so much they quit. A recent report from the United States, it was revealed that 7,000 kids drop out of school each day. That's one every nine seconds. One out of four American high school freshmen won't graduate with his or her class. When you consider their frustration with our flawed educational system, it's understandable.

Understandable but still regrettable. Because as twisted and irrational as school can be, it's still good. It's still important. It's still valuable. Getting a diploma and getting a degree will always be better than not getting it.

The reason, although easy to understand, is just not communicated to kids as much as it should be - that battling their way through our imperfect schools inadvertently prepares them to battle their way around our imperfect planet.

Obviously, schools won't promote this. "As bad as we may be, stick it out because we're preparing you for reality." Yet it's true. Education, sometimes in spite of itself, works. For example, it reinforces Darwin's major point: Adapt or die! Our less than ideal schools unintentionally teach students how to adapt in four ways:

1. Successful students learn how to adapt to different teachers with different styles, different rules and different expectations. Over the course of their school-age years, kids will be exposed to great, good, fair and poor teachers. Learning to cope with the weak ones may, ultimately, teach them more than what they learn from the strong ones. It's the Knight effect. Legendary (and controversial) basketball coach Bobby Knight was so difficult to play for that, after dealing with him, his players could work with anyone.

2. Smart students adapt to their classmates. In our public schools, kids are randomly thrown together into incredibly diverse clusters. I'm always amazed at how well my socially successful students adjust to the idiosyncratic propensities of their peers. Again, perfect classmates are nice, but learning how to deal with the exasperating ones may spur more growth.

3. Strong all-around students - and, right or wrong, kids can't get into college without being sound in all subjects - must adapt to their different courses' requirements. Some kids are math/science kids. Others are English/social science kids. But the best students are industrious, and that enables them to adapt and make the grade in any class, from art to P.E.

4. Tough students gut it out and adapt to the lousy physical conditions in which they're supposed to learn. They have to endure uncomfortable chairs in crowded, too hot or too cold classrooms. Too often, their bathrooms are disgusting and their campuses are ugly. The working conditions at most fast food restaurants are better than the learning conditions at most public schools.

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