No pain, no gain

I’ll tell you something I’ve noticed from visiting a lot of American

schools: the more traditional the teacher, the grimmer the mood. These

classrooms don’t always resemble Dickensian factories, mind you, but if

you watch the kids’ faces (or the teachers’), the phrase ‘joy of

discovery’ probably won’t leap to mind. And here’s the interesting

part: the people who defend the Old School usually don’t deny that this

is true, and they don’t even seem to mind. Sometimes they actually take

a perverse pride in presiding over (or sending their kids to) this

bleak house because for them that constitutes proof that real education

is happening. No pain, no gain.

  – Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve, p. 108