Education is a messy business. I am not talking about the educational “mess” rhetoric that is much in the news. I am talking about the messy quality of even good education.

Education is not a sleek, mechanistic enterprise of “I teach and you learn.” It would be very nice if it worked that way. Instead, education is an emotional set of experiences. That’s what makes it so messy. It involves a lot more than good texts or even quality teachers. They’re important, and yet so much about good education rests on what is inside of every student. This includes student motivation, willingness to work hard, to persevere, to focus.

These emotions are deeply connected to school abilities. They rise and fall and come together at times and fall apart at others: This “soft stuff” can be as hard as any rock and often is the cause of the toughest obstacles to overcome.

First Day Fears & Class Cliques
School itself is a very emotional place. Many of us remember our first days at school as scary and frightening. Tears were shed. We did not want to let go of our parents’ hands. We were heading into a strange world with lots of people who did not know us. We were on our own.

These are memories that stay with us as adults.

Then our children (especially our first child) head off to school for the first time. Those early memories come back to us, unbidden. As we watch our child cross the school threshold, we are crossing it too. The feelings our child feels are ours. We are right there, looking around at all those new faces, just as our child is and we feel emotions doubly – both our child’s and our own.

And we remember the low times in school – often easier to remember than the highs. About the time you were snubbed at recess and told by the class clique, “You can’t play here.” About the time everyone else got invited to a classmate’s birthday party and you weren’t and you thought that the kid was a friend of yours.

Parents hurt when their children go through the same rites of passage at school. My grown daughter found herself with tears in her eyes when her three-year-old son didn’t get invited to a schoolmates’ party. She was surprised by her emotions.

As a grandparent. I counseled the usual banal rationality: “Don’t over-react. It’s not tragic.” But, the truth is that these memories from our own school days are very powerful. They bubble up when we see our own children suffer through similar rejections. “Get over it,” we say to ourselves and to our children. But, these memories stay with us.

The Emotion-Achievement Connection
That’s why we can’t overlook the power of emotion when it comes to children’s achievement and to working with parents. Inside all of us is that frightened kid who first went through the school door. Children experience these feelings anew and they inherit their parents’ feelings too.

How I wish that education reform could be accomplished in the easy, simplistic ways that legislators presume. We teach. Students learn. We test. Success! If this were really how it all happens, it would be grand. But the problem is that this is a romance novel version (not even a Grimm’s fairy tale) of the complexities involved in teaching and learning.

As a longtime teacher and teacher trainer, I don’t want to minimize the impact of school reform initiatives, but all depend on the attitudes, behaviors and habits that students bring into and learn in the classroom. These are what I have come to call MegaSkills and they are taught and reinforced in the home and community as well the classroom. We can teach these. But first, we have to recognize their importance.

In a bookstore recently, I saw an exhibit of very young children’s books – The Berenstein Bear series. I was pleased by the multitude of titles about emotions related to school including: bullying, teasing, bad report cards. These issues are vital to improve test scores, yet, within the school setting, even at PTA nights, they can get overlooked.

We build test scores when we build students. It’s as new and as old as that. The child who feels unmotivated or is hungry and tired will have difficulties getting high test scores no matter which legislators have “taken over the school.”

It doesn’t surprise me when I read that a mayor takes over the school and test scores don’t improve. But, it’s always a headline as though somehow the mayor could wave a magic wand.

Education is about a lot more than contracts with outside authorities. Education is a contract with ourselves, with our motivation, our perseverance, and our optimism and yes, hope. That’s what makes it so messy.

The Overlooked Emotional Curriculum
It’s difficult to talk emotions in school because that is what not school is “supposed” to be about. It is supposed to be about academics – “That’s it, go forward, achieve.” Yet, many of our low achieving children are being held back because they are not equipped with what it takes emotionally to do well in school. They need practice not just in phonics but in paying attention, working with others, keeping at what they need to accomplish.

By and large, kids, like everyone else, want to succeed. That’s why we have to keep finding ways to affect the inner core of the habits, attitudes, behaviors that determine children’s capacities to do well in school and to get higher test scores.

I don’t want to turn teachers into therapists. Yet, we’re working with people not robots, with all too human students, who have to pass the tests and parents who have got to get involved to help. This is the human factor. This is very messy. This is what we have to address as we struggle to reform education.

Dr. Dorothy Rich is founder and president of the nonprofit Home and School Institute. She is the author of MegaSkills and the MegaSkills teacher and parent education programs which are used by more than 4000 schools across the nation. (www.MegaSkillsHSI.org [1] and www.AdultMegaSkills.org [2])