Once upon a time, the obvious answer was a clear “yes.” But things are a little less black and white now. Even so, does that mean it’s time to ditch the old way of doing things and spend more time on positive reinforcement for children? Let’s explore the two theories in depth and try to find an answer that would truly be best for the education system as a whole.

Positive Reinforcement: Most Effective?

In asking the question “should teachers fail students,” it’s important to consider the ramifications of failing students.

Presumably, we’re talking about students in grade school and up – first grade right on up to the senior year of high school. In the current education system, teachers are indeed allowed to fail students and in some occasions, will actually hold students back if the feedback of the parents and the school administration agrees.

The argument is that during these formative years, children need to develop a sense of accomplishment if they’re going to have a healthy sense of self-esteem as adults. Going to school and putting in effort only to see that they’ve failed could potentially damage their psyche; after all, what’s the point of doing what everyone else is doing and being a productive member of society if you’re just going to fail?

The argument continues: building up a student’s confidence throughout the years will not only help them to feel like they’re intelligent, but it might end up being a sort of Pygmalion effect – or, in other words, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Students that expect themselves to excel and achieve will tend to do so simply because that’s what they’ve become hard-wired to do. Positive reinforcement has led to the right brain-wiring to recreate success again and again. Failure, after all, is just a form of feedback: kids need to learn how to succeed in school if they’re going to learn how to succeed in the real world.

Accountability and the Possibility of Failure: Most Realistic?

The counterargument is that a solely positive-reinforcement environment present in school is not present in the real world; students will therefore not develop the characteristics to be dynamic, high-functioning adults. Without the possibility of failure, there is no real feedback for improvement and also no incentive to succeed. Pain is a real part of life, and pain avoidance is an effective motivator.

People who promote this theory might also agree that this is how children of a very young age learn intuitively. Small children who put their hands on a hot stove will quickly “fail” their way into understanding that contact with a hot stove is to be avoided at all costs. Without this same kind of feedback built into the education system, how can children ever be expected to overcome obstacles and challenges?

Then there is the chief reason people wan teachers to be able to fail children: the idea that resistance builds strength. Just as a muscle is not developed by positive reinforcement but by the resistance and difficulty of lifting weights, a child’s full intellect cannot be developed fully without some degree of hardship and the possibility of failure. This is how it is in the real world, and children might as well start building those intellectual muscles before they enter said world.

But which theory is right?

Choosing the Right Course on Grading Students

Neither theory is proven – education is more complicated than that – but my opinion is that being able to fail students is the best way to go. Teachers need to be armed with the right tools to educate children well if they’re going to do their job, and without the possibility of failure, their hands are tied.

Similarly, giving the students nothing but happy-happy feedback all the time denies them the strength-building of failure.

Recently, the New York Times highlighted a particular school in the Bronx that believes that character is only built through resistance – or, in other words, through failure. In the article “What if the Secret to Success is Failure?” the schoolmaster Dominic Randolph was quoted as saying: “People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”

He added: “The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure…and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”

If educators at a level as high as Randolph’s are noticing these trends, there must be some substance to the idea. And indeed teachers have been failing students for years, with no need for “positive reinforcement” to take hold over that period of time.

Of course, there is no system-wide solution for schools; they should be allowed to compete with each other and customize their curriculum to the requirements of both students and parents. They should have to face accountability themselves – including the possibility of failure – if they too are going to overcome the obstacles in education in order to create a better future for today’s young.

In asking whether or not teachers should be allowed to fail students – my conclusion is that they should – a larger issue is this: should teachers and principals also be allowed to fail? Accountability and competition are spurs to growth and improvement, not impediments. The sooner the education system discovers this fact, the better.

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And a commitment like that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

So if you have at least a smidgen of doubt about the college experience and its true cost today, we invite you to keep reading and find out what the entire picture looks like through a more realistic scope.

Factor #1: Lost Time

Working a 40-hour-a-week, minimum-wage job with two weeks of vacation in 2011, you would have made approximately $14,500 per year. If you worked that job instead of college, you would have made a total of $58,000. (And when you consider that a lot of people don’t graduate from college after only four years, you start to get an idea of what might be lost).

Again: that’s just minimum wage. And while many people do work part-time or even full-time through their college years, there’s no doubt that the time they spend in classes is time they could have spent earning money.

If a family was to keep a child until the age of 22 and encourage them to keep all of the money they saved in those four years and put the money away for retirement in the stock market (average annual rate of return = about 12%), that money would become $2,441,309 by the time the child turned 55. The power of compound interest shows just how much potential money is lost during key years of a person’s life. What does a degree really cost? Potentially millions upon millions of dollars.

Sure, the idea is that college repays your investment by helping you get a better job. But better jobs can be found through hard work in the job sector just as easily as they can be won by college degrees, and the person who avoids college has 4 years of experience on the person who went to college. Either way, it’s hard to debate that time spent at college is time that could be spent in other valuable ways.

Factor #2: Interest Paid

If you think that paying for college is as simple as paying the price of tuition, then you should probably major in finance – because you need it.

The fact is, you have to pay interest on any loans that you take out to pay for your time at college. And as you go through your late 20’s, you’ll realize that you weren’t paying for college simply while you were in college – you’ll continue to pay for it perhaps even decades later. And guess what’s happened in the meantime? Interest has been collecting on that debt. This is, of course, the opposite of what’s been happening to your money if you’d simply taken your college tuition payments and put it in the stock market – there it would be earning compound interest for you rather than accruing against you.

The hope is that going to college is worth this steep cost. But college had better really prepare you for the outside world if it’s going to justify exactly what you’re paying – and will continue to pay – to attend.

Factor #3: Student Living

One of the “perks,” so to speak, of going to college is that you get to experience the college life. Room and board are typically inexpensive compared to room and board in the outside world.

But living as a student is living that you wouldn’t have to worry about if you weren’t attending college – any extra costs, therefore, have to be attributed to the decision of attending college. Books cost an additional thousand per year – and that’s being conservative – and commuting to college also means you’ll be spending more on your car and gasoline.

After a few years at college, these costs add up. The college quotes you a tuition price but doesn’t tell you how much you’ll have to spend to simply live as a student. Those costs are extra.

Factor #4: Real-World Opportunities

Most people will find that their college experience simply didn’t prepare them for the real world – getting a job and paying their bills did. It’s that lack of experience in the real world (as well as the lack of exposure to its opportunities) that perhaps presents the most glaring and indirect cost of going to college.

Yes, it’s hard to quantify what missed opportunities mean. But how many people find that their college degree really afforded them the opportunities it was supposed to? How many people with theatre majors are acting professionally rather than waiting tables? How many people with English degrees can avoid the teaching route and actually apply their skills in real and valuable ways? How many people won internships through school that they couldn’t have won outside of school?

Factor #5: Wastefulness

Many people go to college as an undecided major. Is it possible to be more foolish with one’s education than not to have a specific goal with it? It’s wasteful to spend so much money on a college education that isn’t pointed in one specific direction. A doctor who attends college and medical school knows that he needs certain expertise to treat people. But what does an “undecided” major ultimately get to do with the information they learned through their college experience? In truth, they have just wasted a lot of time – and a lot of money.

Making college worth the cost is not very difficult. People who attend trade schools and know what they want to do can quickly turn their learning experience into real-world income-generating opportunities.

But the way college is viewed now – almost like an extension of the high school diploma – is wasteful. Young people are growing up slower and entering the real world with hesitation instead of an intrepid spirit. Perhaps that’s the greatest hidden cost of all.

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Your answers will probably vary. Sure, some students have genuine special needs that need to be catered to in a one-on-one situation. But should the scope of tutoring really go beyond that, aside from voluntary tutoring for people who can afford it?

The truth is, there’s far too much homework and far too much tutoring going on in the education system today. All of this extracurricular study is unnecessary; after all, schools have children for six or seven hours a day. That’s more than enough to give them a proper education and help develop them as people; why should tutors, homework, and other extra activities all focused on handling the same problems that were addressed in class even be necessary?

In short, why do so many students need tutoring?

The answer, of course, is that the education system is failing American children on a national level, and that tutors are brought in to not only supplement, but to replace shoddy work of teachers who are not able to instruct their children despite constant access to their attention.

But the problem may go a little deeper than that; the act of homework and extra nightly work in the form of tutoring might themselves be inherently flawed. Let’s take an unconventional look at tutoring and education and figure out what’s really going on here.

First Things First: How Necessary is Homework?

Of course, to suggest that homework and tutoring are the same thing is folly. But the essential idea –the need to be educated (whether by the self or by someone else) outside of the bounds of the classroom –  is that the classroom somehow isn’t enough. Even if tutoring is not a rampant commonality of existence in the modern classroom, homework is. So it’s worth taking a look at.

Looking at the entire picture, it’s first clear that children spend enough time at school to receive an education (despite the ongoing delaying of the completion of education from high school to college to graduate school, and so forth – but that’s a tale for another time). Children go to school early and get home in the afternoon, typically spending some 7 hours daily (or 35 hours a week) at their school.

The question is simple: why isn’t classwork enough? Why is homework required? What is it about certain assignments that could not be handled in the classroom? Surely teachers would benefit if more students were doing their homework while still at school; it would give them more time to respond to questions and more time to plan their curriculum as students are busy reading and writing away. Most jobs don’t require homework; should school?

And if the true learning happens not as students hear a concept, but practice it, should not more emphasis be placed on the practice rather than assigning homework as a kind of “away mission” of sorts? Teachers should be present to correct errors as students try and err; is not homework essentially the main art of education? Why then is it left to the home and not the school? School has less distraction and holds kids in some of the prime hours of their daily alertness.

With this approach to learning, it’s no wonder children need tutoring at home; they need someone present to help them as they do their homework. But formalized education should be schoolwork, not homework. It should be the work students are doing at school. And teachers should be there.

They’re not.

The Rise of the Tutor

The idea of a tutor is nothing new; private education throughout civilization has included one-on-one instruction for the privileged. Today it is often the same: those with the means to afford a tutor are the ones receiving the specialized instruction they so need.

But tutors have become commonplace, as well; they’re frequently needed to address a student’s problems with a particular class, to prepare the underperforming high school athlete for the requirements of the college that is recruiting him.

The simple question is why.

But the answer is simple. Aside from special cases, teachers do simply not execute the art of teaching well enough to prohibit the need of a nightly tutor. A class is full of learning only if the teacher talks at the children long enough to fill the period; why is a class, working in silent, not considered the same? If children were able to do their schoolwork at school and ask questions of their teachers on a daily basis, it would essentially make each teacher a tutor. In every interaction, they’re providing one-on-one feedback.

Teachers are not tutoring at school, so students are forced to find tutors elsewhere. And it’s obvious that tutoring is prevalent nearly everywhere, and at all levels. College students need tutors; high school students, grade school students, all the way down.

Is this an indictment of the entire lecture-based system of education that dominates American culture? Yes. If a teacher’s job is to do just that – teach – no tutors should be required. They should be voluntary and private, of course. Who would deny parents with means the ability to help their child’s education in any way they could? But the tutor should not be necessary, a way of repairing a leaky hole. It should be an addition.

It is not bad teaching alone that is to blame, however. There is also the question of the system itself. Where is the experimentation in education if public schools are required to meet certain standardized test requirements, or expected to conform to a predetermined Way of teaching? There is none. Competition and experimentation – true entrepreneurship – is the real future of education. And if education improves, the need for supplemental one-on-one tutoring should diminish. In fact, the best schools should find ways for students to learn one-on-one and bring homework back to school. That’s the best way to tutor kids.

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These are the breaks students look forward to as they navigate their education. But if the true purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world—a world that doesn’t offer summer vacations unless you’re very wealthy or return to school as a teacher—why do we continue to give students so much time off? If education is as important as we all agree it is, why do students get so many days away from it?

If the rest of the working world doesn’t get to enjoy this kind of time-friendly schedule, maybe it’s time to ask why students—who are training for the working world—and teachers still do.

Summer Vacation: What Gives?

Anyone familiar with the U.S. school system knows about the giant hole in the calendar: no school in the summer. For the three hottest months of the year, students and teachers aren’t expected to work, study, do homework—in fact, they aren’t required to do anything at all.

Why does that gaping hole exist?

In the 19th century, many children—especially in rural areas—were let out of school in spring and fall to help with planting and harvesting. In contrast, children in urban areas often attended school year-round on a more consistent schedule.

Eventually, the push for a unified school calendar took hold. The logical compromise was summer. It aligned well with warm weather and didn’t fully interrupt the planting or harvest seasons. That tradition stuck—and has continued for over 150 years.

Which raises the question: why does this system still exist? The truth is, summer vacation persists mostly out of tradition. It’s deeply rooted in our culture. And frankly, most people—teachers, students, and parents alike—are used to it. If your job came with three months off every year, would you volunteer to give that up?

Other Days Off

While summer accounts for the biggest chunk of student free time, it’s not the only break. In fact, most U.S. school years include only about 180 instructional days—less than half the calendar year. That means students enjoy substantial time off even during the academic year.

Subtract weekends, and what’s left are various weekday breaks: official holidays, yes, but also school-specific days off like teacher workdays, “in-service” days, and planning days. These aren’t typically days off for teachers, but they do leave students at home—because there’s no one available to teach them.

Which brings us to the question: what if students simply went to school more?

Would that really be such a bad thing?

Getting Students in School More

No one seriously disputes that education is crucial to a child’s development. Yet even strong advocates of national education systems support a model that has kids in school for less than half the year.

Granted, children aren’t adults, and breaks are important for their mental and emotional well-being. But many argue that more rigorous academic schedules could yield better results—and that the current number of school days in the U.S. may be one reason American students struggle to compete internationally.

Take South Korea, for instance. Their summer vacation lasts only about six weeks, from July to August—half the length of a typical U.S. break. Scotland’s school year follows a similar pattern.

It’s hard to argue that Scottish or Korean children are overworked or deprived. In fact, cutting back on extended breaks may help prevent the “summer slide,” where students forget material learned the previous year. Too much downtime can lead to stagnation, boredom, and underperformance.

Is More Discipline Needed?

American adults are among the hardest-working in the developed world, often with fewer vacation days than their European peers. But our students? Not so much. Their academic schedules are far more relaxed, leaving a disconnect between childhood learning and adult responsibility.

Perhaps there’s room to strike a better balance—challenging students more consistently throughout the year, while also advocating for adults to receive more vacation time to decompress from work stress.

After all, education’s job is to prepare children for adulthood—and in the U.S., that means preparing them for an American adulthood. There’s certainly room for more school hours, more academic engagement, and ultimately, more opportunities for growth.

If the education system is going to evolve, it has to question outdated norms—like those formed in the 1800s—and explore just how capable our kids really are.

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