No one would ever say that Americans are overeducated, but perhaps we are overschooled. School devours a huge portion of our lives in which we constantly prepare for a future that is continually being deferred. In addition, school sharply constrains personal development as we spend long years in the little seats, learning to keep out of trouble and avoid taking risks.

It may seem strange that someone like me, who has spent most of his career as an education professor (at Michigan State and Stanford), would be arguing that we’re inflicting too much school on our children. But it’s my years of studying the evolving form and function of the educational system that has convinced me we’re giving it too much control over the development of the young.

Modern societies have given education vast responsibility for preparing young people for their futures as workers and citizens. No matter what the social problem, education is the answer: job skills, tooth decay, mental health, social inequality, racism, bad driving, criminality. You name it, school can fix it. And if some schooling is good, then more is better, to the point where there seems to be no upper limit.

Limitless schooling

On the issue of time in school, consider me a case in point. I’m 78 and find I’ve spent more than a third of my life — an astonishing total of 27 years — as a student. And all of this schooling prepared me to spend nearly the rest of my life in the education system, where I taught at the college-level for 43 years, most of it focusing on education itself. (There was some overlap: I was also a student during my first eight years teaching.) In all, between graduating from college and starting grad school, I managed to devote only five years to the real world — as a banker and newspaper reporter. Otherwise, school was my entire life. I tried the real world, didn’t like it, and went back to school, which is, after all, what school trained me for.

I used to raise the issue of overschooling with my graduate students, most of whom were in their late 20s or 30s and still in school after at least 16 years as students. “When are you ever going to grow up and get a job?” I’d ask, knowing full well that I had tried this only briefly and then quickly abandoned it.

What students lose

OK, so one problem with overschooling is that it eats up an inordinate amount of time. But the problem is not just the amount of time spent. It’s also that we seem to be trying in every way possible to constrain students’ behavior and hyper-manage their daily lives. How much truly free time do kids have these days? They often don’t even walk to school by themselves anymore.

In my morning outings in Palo Alto, I keep seeing parents walking or biking with their kids to the local elementary school — when they aren’t dropping them off in a car and then picking them up again in the afternoon. It’s not exactly a high-crime area, but parents seem to be constantly hovering around their kids as though there’s danger lurking around every corner. Kids don’t seem to have opportunities to just goof around with their friends, play pickup games, work a part-time job, or hang out somewhere other than with a cellphone or computer.

It’s a life that is paradoxically both lonely and overregulated. If you’re not in school, you’re in an organized sport, dance class, church group, or summer camp. You miss out on a lot of impromptu opportunities to grow up by learning from personal experience. Perpetually protected from harm and buffered against failure, you never have a chance to get hurt and find you can recover on your own, to fall down and find you can get back up, to make mistakes and learn how to rectify them.

Overschooling seems to be particularly damaging for boys (Miller, 2025). Fueled by testosterone, boys are prone to greater levels of activity and aggression, which keeps them bumping up against the norms of the well-regulated classroom — where students are expected to sit still, take turns, and wait for permission to speak. In general, boys pose chronically greater discipline problems than do girls and get punished more. No wonder they drop out more often.

I was one boy who did well academically in school by fitting into the program, even though I was desperate to be somewhere else, faking illness whenever I could. I never got in fights. I kept my head down and sought to please the teacher. The system rewards those like me who play by the rules and punishes those who don’t.

Stifled progress

In suppressing students’ natural exuberance, schools are teaching boys and girls that risk-taking is dangerous. Better to keep quiet, stay out of trouble, and look for the smoothest path ahead. Risk-taking, however, is an essential component of life and a crucial element in future innovation, productivity, and social progress. By encouraging students to play it safe, stay on the good side of the teacher, and stifle initiative, schools are poorly preparing them for a world where, as investment literature puts it, greater risk is the price you pay to attain greater reward.

Social and economic progress depends on a population that is willing to take risks and rebound from failure — exactly the kinds of actions that schools teach students to avoid. If we inflict less schooling on children, we may be more effective at ensuring they will become well educated.

Reference

Miller, C.C. (2025, May 13). It’s not just a feeling: Data shows boys and young men are falling behind. The New York Times.

This article appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Kappan, Vol. 107, No. 5-6.