When Instruction Becomes Optional
What students learn when instructional time becomes negotiable
On May 1, some school districts closed for students in response to planned protests.
Schools are one of the few institutions explicitly designed to develop foundational skills. Reading, writing, and thinking do not develop incidentally. They require time, structure, and opportunities to engage with material.
That time is limited. It exists within a fixed number of school days and instructional hours. When it is used consistently, skills develop. When it is reduced or interrupted, they do not.
Learning depends on opportunities to respond, receive feedback, and adjust. These patterns require consistency. Students are always learning from the environment, even when no formal instruction is taking place. They learn not only from what is taught, but from what is prioritized.
When instructional time is treated as flexible, the lesson is clear: that the development of core skills is conditional.
Closures like this are often presented as isolated decisions, each justified on its own terms. Students do not experience them in isolation, but rather, they experience the pattern.
The primary function of the school becomes something that can be adjusted to accommodate external events. Over time, expectations change.
Students adapt to what the system consistently reinforces. If time for reading, writing, and math is protected, those skills are more likely to develop. If that time becomes negotiable, students learn that as well. This is how environments shape behavior.
The question is what the system is actually reinforcing over time.
When the core function of school, building foundational skills, becomes one priority among many, rather than the priority, the effects are not always immediate. However, they are cumulative.
Students do not need to be told that something is less important. They learn it through patterns. Through what continues and what pauses. Through what is protected and what is not.
Just as they learn when consequences become inconsistent, they learn when instructional time becomes uncertain. In both cases, the contingencies change.
When contingencies change, behavior follows. Schools do more than deliver content. They establish the conditions under which learning occurs. Those conditions depend on consistency, predictability, and sustained engagement with material.
When those conditions are maintained, students learn what matters. When they are not, students learn something else. The obligation of a school is instruction. That time cannot be recovered once it is lost. When it becomes negotiable, students learn that as well.
While I appreciate the previous comment and agree that valuable learning *can* occur in such instances, I do think Jennifer’s argument captures the broader message being sent to our students (I’d add the COVID closures and subsequent dismissal of required work/learning outcomes - in some cases nearly a year’s worth) when we as adults and professionals drag/encourage/allow students to skip/ignore/miss key parts of the adopted curriculum without consequence. I might feel differently, especially in the case of the protest days, if students made a choice and were then held to both evidence their learning experience AND be held accountable for missed work. There are important lessons about duty and responsibility from the adult world here for high schoolers, I just don’t believe that’s the norm.
In the case of the May Day protest, I claim apples and oranges. Students can learn:
1. The impotant history of that protest.
2. Debate whether a political protest decision by a controlling institution (school district or Governor) should be able to involve them. Students could have a sympathetic opinion,or a contradictory one.
3. Become aware of what is happening in the US that would provoke this action. We are in a situation beyond politics.
4. All of this will contribute to students being well-rounded and more mature in their role in society. This is similar to my life's journey.