While I would agree that students shouldn't be passed with impunity, I'm not sure the fix is kicking students out. The motivational factors that make sense to

While I would agree that students shouldn't be passed with impunity, I'm not sure the fix is kicking students out. The motivational factors that make sense to adults don't necessarily work on kids. Thinking back to when I was 13-14, being kicked out of school would have been a good thing to most of my peers. It would mean no more school, and school was a total hassle at that age. I think the answer lies partly in finding ways to motivate students to learn, and I think the root solution to that is going to lie somewhere with teachers that can sell what they are teaching. I had history teachers that were so into their material it was almost infectious. I had an Algebra teacher that taught everything as if it were the coolest thing in the world. It's hard to not care about something when someone else is visibly excited about it. And I think that has to be coupled with real expectations. People generally rise to the expectations that are set, and kids are no exception. The worst teachers I ever had were the ones that tried to pretend they were on the kid's side. The ones that would admit that what they were teaching was "pointless" but were "just trying to help us get through it because it is required". That is not inspiring. Not only is it uninspiring, but it creates a responsibility vacuum. If things are pointless, and everyone knows it, and there is no real responsibility to take it seriously, then why take it seriously? And finally, I think the biggest fix to the cultural problem has to come from our parents. Most parents are really just older kids, and deep down they have the same outlook on school as those teachers that admit it's "pointless". They talk a big game about education being important, but they don't back it up by actually considering it to be important. I don't think this has to come at the expense of other activities, but getting an A on a test should be at least as important and noteworthy to parents as winning a little league game or Prom night. So yeah, part of it is structural, but it's by no means all structural. The education of people does not occur entirely between 8am and 3pm. Much of what we learn is from our peers and our parents and really anyone else we are exposed to socially. And crucially, the attitude we learn to adopt towards school comes almost entirely from these people who are not part of the school system, and that attitude is crucial in determining how much we get out of that 8am to 3pm period.