Children Have a Right to an Interesting School

Abstract

Historically, the American school has been regarded as an essential vehicle by which the child can prepare for adult success. Despite substantial theoretical argument that childhood learning can both prepare children for later schooling and also be an interesting process in itself, the schools, led more often by “people-activists” rather than “scholar-activists,” have tended on the one hand to be uninteresting or on the other hand to lack depth and substance. The paper argues that every child has a right to an interesting school and goes on to propose that, in its best sense, an interesting school is a place which respects the child's interest in a learning process that is deep and filled with intellectual and emotional substance.