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The problem isn’t that school is too hard. 

It’s that it’s hard in all the wrong ways.

We confuse rigor with worksheets.
We make students memorize, cram, and bubble instead of wrestle, fail, and build.

And when they disengage, we respond by making things easier or more entertaining, instead of more meaningful.

That’s not learning. 

It’s theater.

“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor”

Our schools are increasingly terrified of rough waters. In education, we’ve convinced ourselves that learning should be comfortable, frictionless, even entertaining. We deliberately calm the waters, then wonder why our students can’t navigate when real storms come.

The deception runs deep. 

We look at disengaged students and assume the problem is too much difficulty rather than too little meaning. 

Our solution? 

Make learning more “fun”. Just add games, reduce homework, lower standards, inflate grades. Add some animations on the worksheet. Install an app. Give them iPads. Call it innovation.

All of this is like putting sprinkles on shit.

We don’t need more sprinkles. We need to stop serving up the same old shit.

An LA county charter school teacher recently confided: “My job is more entertainer than educator now.” 

We’ve traded rigor for relevance theater. 

Mastery for dopamine.

Meanwhile, student engagement continues its freefall. Because real sailors aren’t made by simulating storms on screens. They’re forged in actual waves, facing real consequences, solving problems that matter.

The Fraud of Educational Comfort

Today’s schools are masterful at creating what might be called “empty difficulty”. This is struggle that builds neither character nor competence. 

Students endure:

• Memorizing formulas they’ll never use
• Solving artificial problems with no real-world parallels
• Writing essays no one beyond their teacher will ever read
• Taking standardized tests that just measure test-taking ability
• Discussing current events that the teacher finds interesting

This kind of work is special in that it manages to be simultaneously hard AND worthless. 

It demands effort without offering meaning. 

It’s like forcing someone to dig a hole and then fill it back up again, day after day, while insisting this builds “character” or will help you “learn how to learn”.

When students disengage from this charade, our response is telling. 

We don’t question the charade itself. 

Instead, we add gamification, i.e., apps, iPads, achievement badges, points systems, animated rewards. We’re essentially saying: “We know this work is meaningless, so we’ll bribe you to do it anyway.”

This approach betrays a profound cynicism about young people. 

It assumes they’re incapable of meaningful work.

That they must be tricked and coerced into learning through artificial rewards and shallow entertainment. 

It treats them as consumers to be pandered to rather than builders to be challenged.

This is what you do when you don’t believe in kids. 

You distract them.

The Lie Exposed

The fraud becomes obvious when you observe what students do voluntarily in their extra-curriculars (sports, music, theater, etc) or their hobbies.

• The teenager who can’t focus for 10 minutes on a worksheet will rehearse a dance routine for hours straight ahead of a big performance. 
• The student who “can’t remember” basic math facts will effortlessly recite detailed statistics about every player on their favorite football team, tracking yards gained, completion percentages, etc without being prompted
• The student who shows no interest in reading Shakespeare will spend hours scouring research for a Model UN debate, absorbing complex geopolitical concepts that would challenge most adults.
• The child labeled “unmotivated” will rebuild an engine from scratch, mastering intricate mechanical systems through pure determination rather than formal instruction.

This isn’t because these activities are easy. 

They’re often very difficult and competitive, requiring persistent effort through frustration and failure. But they’re meaningful difficulties. The struggle serves a purpose beyond the classroom’s artificial economy of points and grades.

The Science of Productive Struggle

The research is unambiguous: productive struggle leads to deeper, more durable learning.

When students grapple with complex problems before receiving explicit instruction, they develop mental frameworks that make subsequent learning more meaningful and transferable. 

Cognitive scientist Manu Kapur calls this productive failure and has shown that students who first attempt to solve problems, even unsuccessfully, outperform those who receive step-by-step instruction from the start. As he puts it, “The act of inventing solutions, even if incorrect, prepares the mind to learn better from instruction” (Kapur, 2008; 2016)​

This shouldn’t surprise us. 

Our brains didn’t evolve to fill out worksheets; they evolved to solve real problems. 

As Schwartz and Bransford demonstrated, students who experience “desirable difficulties” before instruction are better prepared for future learning.

They know not just the answer, but why it works, and when to apply it​.

Research on “desirable difficulties” by Robert and Elizabeth Bjork backs this up. Strategies like spaced practice, interleaving topics, and varying learning conditions create more challenge up front but ultimately result in stronger long-term retention. “Conditions that make performance improve quickly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer,” write the Bjorks. The paradox is clear: struggle feels inefficient but builds strength.

A similar conclusion comes from the ICAP framework developed by Michelene Chi, which ranks passive listening as the lowest form of learning and generative engagement, like struggling with a problem, as the highest. 

Constructive thinking isn’t clean or easy.

It’s messy, effortful, and cognitively demanding. That’s the point.

And despite the evidence, most schools still treat difficulty as a defect rather than a feature. 

We assume students need to be coaxed, entertained, or spoon-fed information when in fact, they’re starving for meaningful work that challenges them.

As Kapur notes, “Failure is not just a stepping stone to success, it’s a cognitive lever for deeper learning.”

High Challenge Paired With High Support

The secret isn’t lowering expectations, but in raising them while also providing commensurate support. 

My friend, Martin Blackman, the former General Manager of Player Development for the USTA (US Tennis Association) turned me on to the challenge-support framework which I think is instructive here. 

The most powerful learning environments combine ambitious challenges with robust resources and guidance:

• High Challenge, Low Support = Anxiety and Frustration
• Low Challenge, High Support = Boredom and Complacency
• Low Challenge, Low Support = Apathy and Disengagement
• High Challenge, High Support = Growth and Mastery

This last quadrant of high challenge paired with high support creates what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” where students are stretched beyond their comfort zones while having the resources to rise to the occasion.

This doesn’t mean protecting students from failure.

It means creating environments where failure is both expected and productive. Places where students know they’ll stumble but won’t be abandoned when they do.

But let’s be honest: parents, we are not innocent here.

I certainly am not.

• We celebrate 4.0s without asking what was actually learned.
• We panic when our kids stumble, so we helicopter in with tutors, excuses, and always-on help
• We say we want resilient kids, but treat every struggle like a bug to be fixed.
• We confuse comfort with support and then wonder why our kids crumble under pressure.

We’ve absorbed the same lie schools have: that struggle is a sign something’s gone wrong.

But what if it’s the signal that something real is finally happening?

What Real Learning Feels Like

Real learning isn’t comfortable. It’s frustrating. It’s messy. It often looks like failure until it doesn’t.

But when the work matters, students rise.

Think about what happens when students take on real challenges:

• Solving problems that affect their communities
  
• Presenting to real audiences, not just teachers
  
• Working across disciplines because the problem demands it
  
• Getting feedback from professionals, not just grades
  
• Revising not because of a rubric, but because someone’s counting on them
  
• Staying up late not for a test, but because the stakes are real
  

They struggle. They fail. They regroup. And they come out changed.

This isn’t the fake rigor of timed essays and multiple-choice traps.

It’s real-world accountability.

And students don’t resent the difficulty but take pride in it.

Here’s the twist: this kind of hard isn’t always fun in the moment.

• It’s not Type 1 fun. This is the instant gratification of a video game or a gamified worksheet.
• It’s Type 2 fun. This is the kind that only feels good after the fact. The kind that leaves a mark. The feeling of accomplishment you get after you and friends run a marathon together.

Nobody remembers their daily school assignments.

They will remember the one they almost gave up on and wrestled with. The one they finished at 2am and nailed, not because it was due the next morning, but because it was going in front of a room full of local business owners who might actually use their ideas.

That’s the difference.

Not a slideshow for a grade.

>>> A strategy to help a local business attract more customers.

Not a science fair tri-fold. 

>>> A prototype for a real-world flood sensor after a local storm.

Not a pitch for an imagined product in a fake in-class Shark Tank.

>>> A real business that solves a real problem on behalf of its customers.

Most school projects are forgotten because they were designed to be forgettable.

They are boxed into rubrics, disconnected from anything that matters.

The ones students remember are the ones that mattered to someone else.
That created stakes.
That called them to rise.

And that’s the point. Not comfort. Not compliance. But growth earned through struggle.

The struggle becomes a story worth telling. 

The Institutional Obstacle

Our educational institutions aren’t built for this kind of learning. 

They’re optimized for standardization, measurement, and sorting and not for facilitating meaningful work. The requirements of productive struggle are real problems, authentic audiences, flexible timelines, integrated subjects.

These don’t fit neatly into 45-minute periods, standardized tests, or traditional grading systems.

Which is why meaningful change will likely come from outside traditional structures, from new models built around productive struggle rather than empty difficulty.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The uncomfortable truth is this: we’ve made school hard in all the wrong ways.

Busywork, pointless pressure, artificial deadlines. etc. This is difficulty without meaning. And when students push back, we try to distract them with apps and animations instead of fixing the core problem.

But unlike the weather, education isn’t something we endure. It’s something we choose.

We can build schools that trade fake rigor for real challenge. These are schools where effort leads to purpose, and struggle actually matters.

So ask yourself:

Is your child working hard on something that’s real? Something that matters beyond the classroom?

If not, then why are we all pretending this is okay?