Wounded by School Book Review
Kirsten Olson Tells How to Find the Joy in Learning
Aug 25, 2009 Patricia Faulhaber
Deciding whether Wounded by School Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture by Kirsten Olson (Teachers College Press, 2009) is a book about education and how it needs reformed or if the book is a self-help book for those students that an antiquated educational system failed, is a difficult task.
Possibly the book serves as both a testimonial from those who were wounded by their early school years and as a guide to find the joys that can be found in learning and education.
Either way, Kirsten Olson has found the heart of what K12 educational systems severely lack; compassion, creativity, empathy, freedom to enjoy learning, and social rewards.
Types of School Wounds
Olson started the research for this book by talking to “normal, ordinary students not just those with identified learning exceptionalities, differences, or other unconventionalities.”
She does an exceptional job of relating how people have been wounded by their early years of school through gripping and compelling case studies.
Some of the school wounds Olson identifies are:
- Wounds of Creativity
- Wounds of Compliance
- Wounds of Rebelliousness
- Wounds that Numb
- Wounds of Perfectionism
- Wounds of the Average
- Wounds of the Underestimated
The Blame for School Wounds
Olson includes information on where to place the blame for the school wounded. She tells readers, “On one thing, however, most educational policy makers, teachers, parents, and students do agree. Almost everyone I speak with concurs that schools are fundamentally old-fashioned institutions.”
Olson discusses out-dated school equipment, teachers not paying attention to their students while teaching, and lesson plans that don’t fit today’s learning styles.
Healing School Wounds
Olson uses case studies to illustrate how students can and have recovered and healed their wounds inflicted by their early school experiences.
Accepting the school wounds is the first step in healing. Next comes one or all of the following thought processes:
- Good things can come out of bad things.
- My deficits are the shadow side of my great gifts.
- Challenges are wonderful-being labelled and told what you cannot do isn’t.
- I know how my own mind works; I work with my strengths, and compensate for my weaknesses.
Back to School
School reform has been a hot topic for the past few decades and schools have made little changes in that time frame, especially urban schools. Olson’s unique way of relating how people feel about their childhood and teenage years in school and the profound ways those experiences affected them throughout their lives, is an attention grabber.
She ends the book with, “As this book expresses, I believe that it is incumbent on every person who has been wounded by schools to take account of his or her wounding and to honor it, to not be ashamed of it, and to work to change the conditions of schooling that lacerate.”
Making such a strong commitment and statement, according to Olson, may help give birth to new forms of educational institutions that can serve students better.
Read the Kirsten Olson' interview here.
Back to School Without the Wounds
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