What Ever Happened to Class?
By TMP 43rd Editorial Board
Despite relative distance from college deadlines, exam dates, and senior “lasts,” at Milton, this time of year always features a slurry of rewritten schedules, canceled classes, and moratoriums on major assignments. This chaos is partially justifiable: Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a mandatory federal holiday, and Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year for roughly one tenth of our community. However, the administration’s chosen response to these days off, as well as the school’s needless creation of Milton-specific impediments to learning, calls into question our attitude toward academics writ large.
Because of Yom Kippur, Milton missed a day of classes, an hour of clubs, an afternoon of sports games, and an evening of dorm dinner. In a maddening display of miswrought priorities, the school rescheduled games and dorm dinner, cancelling tertiary events in doing so, while leaving classes and clubs wholly forgotten. While Milton cannot unilaterally decide the ISL’s schedule, it has decided that only team-building is unmissable. At a supposedly elite preparatory school that lauds itself for “academic rigor,” shouldn’t the favoring of non-intellectual pursuits give us pause?
In more everyday cases, teachers constantly reorganize their schedules to make space for early sports dismissals, yet missed class time is almost never offset. Furthermore, on September 17, we eschewed half a day of classes for “lockdown training,” an exercise that easily could have taken place during the opening of school, when it would not have stopped teachers from doing their jobs.
The list goes on: from marathon advisory sessions to well-meaning but often arbitrarily-filled “student leadership summits,” the administration’s belief in the magic of getting students in a room together, even for flagrant busywork, seems to exist in every imaginable case, except when that room is a classroom led by a teacher. Ultimately, we have come to see filling time as inherently productive, irrespective of the intellectual value of how that time is filled. In other words, we have come to prioritize having something to do over learning.
All of these changes beg the question: why does Milton deprioritize class time? The Milton Paper suspects a correlation with declining attention spans. Per research by UC Irvine’s Dr. Gloria Mark, average teen attention spans have declined since 2012 from seventy-five seconds to forty-seven seconds. The confluence of COVID-19, short-form video content, and artificial intelligence has created a generation of high schoolers much more averse to work than past generations.
We are, of course, referring to global trends, but Milton’s gradual decision to cave to this degradation of the adolescent brain and reframe its mission as keeping us occupied rather than teaching us has manifested as an institutional deprioritization of academic time. Institutional change, in turn, has brought about a school culture in which students implicitly devalue academic pursuits in favor of self-serving placeholder activities from which we stand little to gain. For next week, the Academic Dean has reworked schedules to preserve D and G blocks lost due to Indigenous Peoples’ Day; going forward, that kind of decision has to take precedence over non-academic considerations.
Milton’s academic spaces alarmingly appear to wave the white flag to this culture no longer invested in learning. The lack of interest in currently non-running half-courses like archeology and journalism over fears of heavy workloads, as well as clubs’ shifting their focus toward entertainment and away from learning and introspection, stand as disappointing examples. Take in-class essays, which effectively constitute teacher-supervised homework: would we need them if we didn’t discard actual homework in the service of the brimming non-academic schedules of LinkedIn warriors?
When students chafe at the prospect of homework as if it were being asked—not required—of us, while happily spending Tuesday evenings at boarding pep rallies, it reinforces that the creeping deprioritization of class is supported by the student body. We should not allow Milton to become a place that values busy-ness over learning, and transactionality over genuine interest.
As much as we appreciate Milton’s community focus, students are ultimately here to learn, something that is swept under the rug when we devalue academics. We hope to see available time in the future used to make up for missed classes rather than non-academic commitments and overall greater prioritization of Milton’s academic ecosystem.