Deerfield Rigor Kills Curiosity

Recently, I’ve begun thinking about how I want to structure my junior year class schedule. I’ve been stacking my list with courses that are as rigorous as possible and considering what they will mean for my junior year experience. I came to one main conclusion: I won’t sleep very much.

This realization made me contemplate my Deerfield education. Specifically, I reflected on what a rigorous Deerfield class entails. I associate hard Deerfield classes with pages upon pages of reading, eight-hour days spent in the library studying for midterm tests, and overwhelmingly large amounts of work. I picture late nights half working half falling asleep at my desk, countless missed hours of sleep, and failed attempts to balance academic schedules with extracurricular interests and social interactions.

It seems like Deerfield rigor is measured heavily based on the sheer amount of time a student must pour into a class in order to keep up with the curriculum. But I think this is the wrong way to approach rigor.

I believe that classes can become more rigorous in two main ways: by requiring an increased volume of work and by involving more difficult or complex work. Increasing volume may look like requiring forty pages of reading instead of twenty, while increasing difficulty looks like taking a deeper dive into a subject or exploring more complex ideas; the two are not mutually exclusive. 

The often unavoidable, objectively unhealthy sleep schedules that large portions of the student body follow show that Deerfield uses the former method significantly. In 2021, a survey conducted on the junior class with 95 respondents found that 91.6% of juniors would sleep more if they had less work. Additionally, 90% of respondents reported that they were feeling “super stressed.” These statistics show widespread overworking; it feels like there is a common understanding that students must sacrifice sleep, mental health, social connections, and overall wellbeing in order to succeed in difficult classes.

In A Framework for Schools, Head of School Dr. John Austin writes that “the purpose of schools is to enlarge the vision of young people, deepen and sustain their curiosity, and increase their appreciation of the world’s complexity.” In essence, schools are meant to help students find their passions and to encourage curiosity. However, in addition to being simply unhealthy, Deerfield’s model of rigor that overemphasizes volume restricts the ability of challenging classes to inspire passion in the students that take it.  With excessive volume and overworking, no matter how much students love a subject, they begin to associate it with stress and fatigue.

This idea is that of the Self-Determination Theory, a major psychological framework that compares the results of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation involves doing something out of enjoyment for it, while extrinsic motivation entails doing something for an external benefit such as a grade, a reward, or a punishment. The scientific theory argues that when people learn under extrinsic motivation, their intrinsic motivation for the subject declines. 

Crucially, Deerfield’s heavy, stress inducing use of volume to increase rigor is effectively killing students’ passion for it.

I believe that if Deerfield truly wants to “deepen and sustain [young people’s] curiosity,” it needs to change the way it approaches rigor. Deerfield can achieve this by prioritizing complexity over volume in classes. Instead of pushing students to consume large amounts of material, course programming should focus on helping students learn the necessary volume as efficiently as possible, making space for deeper thinking and intellectual exchange about more complex topics. Academic Affairs must enforce homework limits. Every Deerfield student has heard of the supposed fifty minute and, for honors classes, seventy minute homework limits. However, I doubt many students have felt its effects. Enforcing these time caps not only promotes healthier lifestyles among students, but also prevents the negative associations that lead students towards developing a dislike for topics they previously enjoyed. Teachers can also collect student input. Periodic surveys on the pace of a class, the method in which it is taught, and general feedback on the class can illuminate issues with the curriculum. For example, if the vast majority of students claim that they are consistently spending more than two hours a night on homework, this may indicate the need for teachers to find more efficient ways to teach the material.

Deerfield needs to start prioritizing complexity and depth over volume. It needs to stop killing curiosity.