Why I have no respect for our education system
The answer is simple: Because it is an inefficient service that produces substandard results and has tons of very negative side effects for society.
Let’s think about education as if it was a commercial service. Being a tax paying citizen who is a customer of the government that provides us with the education system, I have to ask myself:
What do I expect from the education system in order to become a happy customer?
I am expecting it to produce mature citizens who acquired the knowledge they need to become useful members of society. This comes with a few preceding requirements:
- They should know how to live a fulfilling life.
- They have to understand society and the world to a degree that they are able to lead independant lives.
- Based on that they should be able to figure out where they can make the most meaningful and appropriate contribution to society, for example by contributing to a solution for a problem that other people have.
Instead what do we get?
Young adults that spend around 14,000 hours (12 years * 39 weeks * 30 hours) at school. Most of them have no idea what to do after graduation, since they don’t know what they want and what kind of jobs are out there. They downloaded tons of mostly useless information into their brains and forgot most of it already. Let me list some of the precious knowledge (*sarcasm*) that I acquired in school in order to illustrate how nuts this system is:
- What segments does an earthworm have?
- How do I spot an epiphora in a poem?
- How do I translate a text from latin into german?
The german philosopher Richard David Precht lists a few more examples in this speach about the failures of the german education system (Sorry it’s in german).
The justification for this madness is usually that it is important to gain an overview and universal education about the most important fields. To that I have two things to say:
- We don’t receive an overview but rather a lot of detailed knowledge: An overview would mean that we are able to situate a fact within a broader context. But by being overwhelmed with absorbing all that detailed stuff there is mostly no time for stepping back and asking for the broader context.
- Knowledge that I have forgotten again is no knowledge. It means that I can’t use that knowledge for anything. Whenever I want to do something with it, I have to re-learn it first. So why not just learn it, when I really need it?
Even if education were successful at these things, the burning question remains:
Is it really the most efficient way to ground children for 14,000 hours in order to get to: “I have heared of that before, but I don’t really remember.” ?
Seeing this status quo, we at best partially fulfill the second of my initial requirements towards the education system. If that were the outcome of an actual commercial service, I would demand a refund and look for a better solution.
Side Effects
Unfortunately our education system is not only failing to deliver some key requirements but also comes with negative side effects. I personally was a “good student”. I had good grades and caused no trouble. Yet coming out of school I thought the world is a narrow space with limited, unattractive options and most knowledge was either too hard for me to ever understand or not even existant. My curiosity was dead. Drained in psychological pressure to satisfy the expectations of my teachers by pretending to be interested in something, that I perceived as an annoying chore. My self-image was affirmed as someone who is able to achieve reasonable results with a lot of effort. But mostly I “knew” my limits and how to cheat my way around them. What a limited state of mind! Luckily I was able to overwrite that later on by leaving the education system for several years and pursuing other challenges, before I reentered it through university.
I find the thought troubeling to send my children to an institution that can have such negative effects on their development.
So how should education be instead?
The utopia of education
Learning needs to start with motivation
Psychology tought us, that in order to learn something, we need to form an emotional connection to that knowledge. The easiest way to achieve that is by being interested in the subject matter.
A function of consciousness is to disregard information, that seems to be irrelevant for us. That applies both to new information that is blocked from entering our conscious awareness during perception and to memories that are impossible to recollect if they are not in some way emotionally important to us.
Unfortunately information doesn’t become important to us by a teacher or professor telling us that it is important or relevant for an exam.
All humans have an innate need to underatand their environment. It is detrimental for survival. That’s why we are all curious to learn how the world works. From our first moments on we naturally inhale all knowledge that we can get our hands on.
Our innate curiosity is the wave that education should surf on.
Where learning could be such an easy and satisfying process, powered by the driving force of our interest in the world, we instead built a system of two opposing parties (students and teachers) that constantly fight against each other. Where pupils need to be whipped to study with the use of endless energy and teachers burn out from the kids behaving terribly.
The great documentary “Alphabet” by Erwin Wagenhofer explores the question, how we managed to turn the natural process of learning how the world works into an unbearable chore that most children hate most of the time.
Teaching Methods need to change
We need to turn education around. It has to start with the question of the student.
Hypothesis: Every child will eventually ask the questions that lead to the acquisition of essential skills like maths, science, economics, philosophy, writing, art and so on.
And if not? So what! Not knowing much and not having gone through 12 years of schooling is still better than not knowing much and having gone through 12 years of schooling. What do we have to lose? A few kids that never learned how to conjugate a verb or build the derivative of a mathematical term? Instead they could focus on their personal development and wouldn’t get their self-esteem crushed. They could find their passion and becaome good at something, that is useful for others. Something that would be much more beneficial for society and its economy, then knowing how to mumble a few sentences in french after 5 years of studying it.
By beginning with the question of the student, there needs to be way less energy wasted on grading, discipline, controlling homework and so on.
Instead the curiosity of children could be ecouraged by “Inspration Courses” where they are confronted with questions and problems they might be interested to solve. Then they go ahead and solve them.
Personalised Curiculums
Of course this only works, if every child can attend their own personalised curriculum at the time they want to do so. Therefore a much higher degree of digitization needs to be reached, so that children can learn independantly from a teacher who is physically present. Learning in online courses on their personal devices is something that millions of people do every day already.
The benefits of it are manigfold:
It holds the potential of assuring much higher quality standards for the curriculum, as the learning material can be prepared by the best people in their respective fields. Elon Musk’s “Dark Knight” Analogy here is a great way to illustrate that.
Additionally it can lead to a state where every student can learn in their own speed. Learning is not a function of intelligence but a function of confidence. That’s why an individualised, digital curiculum for every student, where they can repeat things as many times as they need and ask any question they have is the single biggest influence on a successful learning process. The system that we run today tries to apply a one-size-fits-all approach where really only the needs of a tiny fraction of the class is met.
Dedicated Self-Knowledge Coachings
Related to that, schools need to put much more focus on helping people to figure out and develop themselves, their talents and their personalities. The biggest factor to a successful education and development is that persons mental constitution. Therefor schools need to start working on that.
It could mean that every student attends regular self-reflection sessions with trained personell. Additionally they could visit group sessions dedicated to self-development, building up confidence and learning to interact in social situations.
This way pupils can work on their personal goals from early on which would teach them to take responsibility for their own live paths.
How much better can a self-confident and driven student learn than a demotivated and stressed one does?
Get rid of grades
Grades and their psychological implications play a big role in how we manage to turn children with an innate curiosity for the world into pupils that are at the same time bored and overwhelmed.
Created initially to controll whether a student internalised a subject it comes with massive negative side effects:
- It puts pressure on the students, which is the worst condition for an efficient learning process to take place.
- It creates false incentives to learn something for an exam and forgetting it again right after that exam, instead of learning it for its practical application
- It leads to unnecessary focus on comparison and competition with peers, which conveighs a limiting and unproductive message about collaboration and team work
On top of that, whenever I am hiring someone for a new role I never look at their grades as they don’t really serve as a valuable indicator of ones abilities and skills.
Application driven teaching
Finally, learning needs to happen while doing something practically. That has the best chance to create the long lasting knowledge by linking the theoretical fact to a somewhat emotional and practical experience.
Students should work on projects most of the time and learn the skills they need on the way. This way students can pick the projects that they are interested in and understand why they learn something right away. There is no need for grades, as the success of a completed project serves as a much more meaningful implication on a students abilities. And for employers such graduates are way more valuable than people who inhaled a lot of theory but have no practical experience.
These are my requirements for an education system, that I would be happy to pay for and send my kids to. Obviously I didn’t think too much about its feasibility and rather tried to paint an ideal picture, of what would be worth striving for.
