Schools should prioritize vigor, not rigor.
The oldest recorded use of the word rigor is in a line from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, so around 1400ish BCE.
Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn,
For it venquysseth, as thise clerkes seyn,
Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne.
Basically, the teller of this particular tale is saying that rigor ain’t it. And I could not agree more.
Educators talk about rigor all the time, and I can’t take it anymore. First of all, the word we’re looking for here is vigor, we want vigorous learning experiences for young people.
We gotta stop holding up rigor as a virtue in schools. Since its dawn as a word, rigor has been about “hostility,” “hardness,” and “hardship,” according to the OED. (It has always had death vibes, too — eventually leading to the emergence of rigor mortis in the 1800s for “the stiffening of a dead body.”) And honestly, that’s what a lot of you rigor police seem to be offering the young people who the master schedule spits into your classes. You give them an educational experience that deadens their senses through excessive limitations on their physical movement, alienation from their innate intellectual drives, unwarranted surveillance, and the unrelenting threat of punishment. Rigor police, do you really believe that a learning experience has to hurt to be high quality?
Prisons (places for those designated civically dead) and schools both exercise the power of the state to determine a person’s precise physical location under threat of punishment. Until they turn sixteen, people are legally required to be at their designated school, and once there, in their designated classroom, in their designated spot on the seating chart. Of course, they’re not trapped, but they behave as if they feel trapped; that is, they comply or they rebel or they dissociate or they escape some other way. Sometimes they release their frustrations on one another (fights, bullying), sometimes on themselves (self-harm, substance use) and sometimes, not irrationally, on us teachers, their keepers.
In response to this structural reality, a rigorous teacher demands students’ rapt attention (or at least non-disruptive quiet) “from bell to bell.” Rigorous teachers use inflexible grading practices — hard deadlines (no pun intended), liberal use (another unintended pun) of Ds and Fs as mOtIvAtIoN (and as evidence of rigor, because that’s how you know it’s rigorous, if it is difficult for their students to succeed). Rigor usually has more to do with the planned curriculum, one that intentionally inflicts mental distress via demanding too much work in not enough time; assigning texts that are too dense and/or irrelevant for young people to read consensually; giving artificially high-stakes tests that nonetheless have lasting consequences for a “failing” student’s sense of self; and defining excellence using narrow, close-minded parameters. It’s rigorous (again, which gives death vibes) to insist on Shakespeare, literary analysis essays, diagramming sentences — even if the students aren’t reading, are AI-ing their writing (which rigorous teachers then AI-police), and generally speaking, are not retaining much meaningful value whether they respond to rigor with obedience or disobedience.
I accept that some young people can and do learn from these rigorous teachers; I did. I had strict Catholic school teachers and took their “honors” classes and became addicted to positive comments on my papers. I’ve spent ten years in therapy unlearning those grade-grubbing, people-pleasing tendencies, but I did succeed academically (which research has shown was probably bound to happen anyway, primarily because of my parents’ income.)
That part of the “rigorous” reality that many students fail has always tripped me out, the cognitive dissonance of it all. It’s wild to me how many students these same rigorous teachers are presumably willing to fail and forget about year after year, especially when those failures follow predictably racist, classist patterns. Let them do APEX, I guess.
Students who can’t or won’t do what they’re told — no credit, do not advance toward graduation, drop-out and pass through educational death into adulthood. Why is it even possible to fail high school? Can we not all agree that young people are (please God) going to age out of high school, and would it be so wrong to celebrate all of their graduations into adulthood? Where’s the good in telling a significant portion of our very young people that they are failures before they even get started?
By right of being human beings, born able to learn with their whole bodies, all our young people should be vigorously pursuing thriving lives and communities. Some of them will thrive as excellent English professors and some of them will thrive as excellent tattoo artists. The whole point of being an alive human is living vigorously — learning, growing, belonging, trying new things, messing up, connecting, repairing, dancing, revising, napping, healing, creating.
Especially because the world is on fire and we need each other to survive — enough with the rigor. Let students liiiiiiive in these schools.
Notice I’m not saying let students do whatever. Generating vigor, getting the blood pumping and growing strong, takes work and discipline. Sustaining it requires rest and pleasure, too. I can think of a bazillion ways that schools could nurture young people’s innate vigor, but first we have to stop worshiping rigor.
