"Debate, drama and other extracurriculars provide the excitement many classrooms lack. And they can help overhaul the system.
When you ask American teenagers to pick a single word to describe how they feel in school, the most common choice is “bored.” The institutions where they spend many of their waking hours, they’ll tell you, are lacking in rigor, relevance, or both.
They aren’t wrong. Studies of American public schools from 1890 to the present suggest that most classrooms lack intellectual challenge. A 2015 Gallup Poll of nearly a million United States students revealed that while 75 percent of fifth-grade students feel engaged by school, only 32 percent of 11th graders feel similarly." …
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opinion/sunday/fix-high-school-education.html