Bad Metaphor: Schools as Broken

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Written By Nathan Smalley
“People are not problems to be solved—they can and will solve their own problems. But our responsibility is to create the conditions for this to happen. Our students don’t need our paternalism, pressure, or pity. They need us to change our minds and work to change our education system.”
— Camika Royal

Students are not broken. They are not fixer-uppers. Each day, every student arriving to a classroom brings a host of insight, capacity, and knowledge to bear on every minute they dwell there. Why, then, is our discourse about teaching and learning so layered with the language of repair? Why do we so readily describe our schools as broken?

Educational historian Diane Ravitch described the fallacy this way: “Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining… Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.” Heard, Diane.

While I disagree with no less than half of what Dr. Ravitch has argued to date, on this we can absolutely agree: schools are not broken, damn it. And the pernicious metaphor of brokenness infects our discourse, our practice, and our dreams for what education can be.

In the classroom, this myth of brokenness leads teachers to see themselves, their students, their schools, and the communities they serve as in need of repair. It drives us toward tropes of treatment, which themselves are flawed. It leads educators to obsess over perceived gaps between where “broken” students are versus their “unbroken,” privileged peers. It invites an endless loop of testing, as one might take a sick child’s temperature while waiting for a fever to break. It induces what Royal (2013) called “test score mania”—a form of collective anxiety that crowds out the very things that foster meaningful lives: the arts, civic life, wonder, and reflection.

But teachers are not mechanics. 1 And schools are not repair shops. A teacher’s first question in encountering a student mustn’t be “how are you broken?” as one might do when a car won’t start.

In Buddhist practice, we’re reminded that suffering arises not because things are broken, but because we fail to see them clearly. Joko Beck taught that the real work of spiritual life isn’t fixing ourselves—it’s meeting life exactly as it is, with honesty and compassion. When we meet a student with a diagnostic gaze, we see only what's lacking. But when we meet them as they are, we allow for dignity, agency, and growth to emerge from the soil of presence itself.

Our educational system isn’t broken; it’s perfectly designed to yield the results it currently produces. Perhaps it’s clearer to say that a school employing a particular design—be it conscious or otherwise—produces particular effects. So it is in classrooms. Some teachers employ pedagogical designs that enliven and challenge, while others oppress and stultify. Some suppress while others empower. Some teach compliance; others foster leadership. In all cases, particular causes and conditions create particular effects. Educational karma is real. But misdescribing teaching, learning, and schooling as broken moves agency away from those who can and should wield it. It shifts the energy of care and responsibility away from educators and families and toward policymakers and profiteers, who claim solutions for problems they themselves have helped define.

Zen practice urges us to see systems not as fixed or isolated, but as living networks of relationship. The Buddhist principle of pratītyasamutpāda—dependent co-arising—reminds us that no thing exists independently. A struggling student is not a personal failure or a broken object; they are an expression of conditions. Just as no blossom opens in a vacuum, no learner flourishes in isolation. Our work, then, is not repair but relationship—nurturing the subtle web of causes that allow each person’s innate wisdom to unfold.

Ironically, it might just be our metaphors of brokenness that actually break school.

Let me offer a better metaphor: gardening.

Maybe schools are more akin to gardens, and the teachers in each class are like gardeners, creating the circumstances that enable each student to flourish. Just as every variety of plant requires unique conditions—sunlight, water, soil nutrients—to thrive, so too every student brings a particular set of needs to the classroom. Just as different species of plants offer fruit, scent, color, and shade when well nourished, so too do students thrive. So too do they bring wild offerings of creativity, wisdom, and insight.

If a garden doesn’t produce, we don’t say it’s “broken.” We give it what it needs to grow. We address the causes and conditions within our sphere of influence, and we work with focus and care toward the flourishing of the whole. Surely, the garden metaphor is limited and reductive in its own right—but I’ll take the shortcomings of aspiration over the shortsightedness of condemnation.

We’re better off inquiring how we might help students thrive than how to fix them.

REFLECTION

  • Where do you see narratives of brokenness and repair in your teaching? In your dialogue with other educators?

  • What might metaphors of thriving and growth offer your pedagogy? What might they look and sound like in your language?

FOOTNOTES

1. To be clear, I love mechanics, craftsman, and all those glorious artisans who display creativity through their hands. My family is full of skilled welders, masons, and builders whose offerings rival those of Shakespeare, Foucault, or Dewey. Craft is critical and beautiful. And craft work often requires skill and knowledge that exceed those books smarts we educator-types often privilege at our peril. Read Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft for more on this. It’s badass. And it’s inspired me to take welding classes soon.

REFERENCES:

Nathan Smalley
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