Most education is broken: How to prosper in spite of that
Jun 23 '21 • Written by Yassen Shopov
📖 12 minute read
Judging from the analytics of this blog, the chance that you, the person reading this, are in school/uni age is high. That, plus the fact I’m a uni student myself, disillusioned with modern education, made this article bound to be created at some point.
Ever since I started taking my career and education seriously (ever since my 1st year of uni, to be honest), I’ve found more and more reasons why our current educational model is broken at its core. From the often inhumane treatment of school kids by teachers, to the simply impractical methods used - it all leads to us achieving barely anything of value in the future.
There’s often a reason why we tend to rediscover our ways of learning in university. When you finally get treated like an adult, you start to develop independence in all fields of life, in studying as well. But of course, that’s harder to achieve while still in high school.
There’s hope in the tunnel however. Otherwise there wouldn’t be successful people, or they would be all dropouts.
I believe there is a set of very important things our schooling system gets wrong. And if we can tackle those individually, we can get a generation of well-educated kids with much brighter prospects and most importantly - better mental health.
What is wrong?
Oh, boy. rolls sleeves
Speaking from the perspective of a relatively smart kid (I graduated with the 2nd highest diploma in high school), rest assured, my mental health wasn’t any better than other people’s. The constant pressure surrounding my grades and the utter pointlessness of the stuff we studied was really making me desperate for fresh air.
I’ve managed to survive though, and I’ve managed to find the 5 main ways in which most educational models are fundamentally broke. That, and 5 ways you can prosper in spite of all odds.
1. Blind following of tasks
Now this is a huge one. When you first get hooked on the drug known as “formal schooling”, you won’t be 100% sure why you’re there at all. It’s just another obligations. You learn to read, learn to write and speak and if you’re lucky - you learn to learn.
From then on, it gets more vague though. I love giving the example with Geography. You start off with learning some capitals, popular locations, how the Earth looks and works, earthquakes, volcanoes. Not necessarily practical stuff, but you’re a kid, who cares. It’s a volcano, it’s colourful and it kills people, more than enough to keep a 10-year old enthusiastic. Then after some years, you get into the nitty-gritty.
What the hell is soil and how are there different kinds of it?
Okay, you think, soil is important, I’ll keep studying. Then you need to figure out the answer to the grand question - why do I need to know that there are predominantly Chernozem soils in Siberia? It’s not even a matter of ‘I’ll never go to Russia, what’s the point?’, it’s a matter of Í don’t even know what the soil is that I’m standing on, how is any of this either relevant or practical if I don’t work in agriculture?’.
From then on, the rest is history. You keep on doing mental labour, studying stuff without ever being explained why it is even in the curriculum. You’re more or less blindly following along as the teacher moves on with the material, and at the point you’re studying trigonometry it’s usually too late to find enthusiasm again.
How to Prosper in spite of that: Even in university, you will surely encounter subjects and topics that are simply not interesting.
As Simon Sinek said it, start with why.
Try to find a reason for studying something. Often, the main reason is to just pass the class and graduate. But this is rarely enough. Especially in university, when you’ll need motivation to study all the time, it’s important to find a higher reason. This could be some of the following:
I’m studying this to advance my career
I’m studying this because it will help me with X project
I’m studying this because it’ll allow me to study Y thing later on
2. Reluctance to use the Internet
Reluctance to use the World Wide Web has been a common phenomenon ever since the Internet has existed.
Yes, people can mess with Wikipedia and publish untrue information.
Yes, Wikipedia is monitored constantly by professionals to prevent this from happening.
No, teachers don’t care, you can’t use it as a reference.
The Internet has been the main provider of education for most kids nowadays for quite a while, and the concept of Online University has become less and less weird. Platforms like Khan Academy, YouTube, Nebula, Brilliant, Skillshare, Udemy have made it possible to learn very marketable skills online, and even to be taught by masters in those subjects, instead of teachers who are skilled at, well, teaching, and more often than not, if they were so good at the thing they were teaching, they would be doing that as a career instead.
And instead of using those rich resources and teaching kids to navigate the web and sort the useful info from the garbage, teachers tend to treat it like it’s taboo.
How to Prosper in spite of that:
Go against the grain, and use the Internet!
Find a course on Khan Academy to help you do your homework
Try teaching yourself the basics of a language with Duolingo, it isn’t magic, but it’ll get you further than nothing
3. The revelations of online school
When Covid-19 happened and schools turned to online education, becoming and endless stream of Zoom sessions, many things that made schools great were lost. That is, communication with others, practical projects, creative expression in various forms, proximity to sources of knowledge like libraries and teachers.
But when I thought back on it… we didn’t really take full advantage of those when we could, did we?
It really was a sad picture, and I remember vividly being so annoyed that we had all those fun resources at school - interactive boards, chem. labs, so on. And we never once used them to their full potential. All those tools gone to waste.
And yes, sometimes the teacher themselves weren’t qualified enough to use those tools, which is another failure of schooling entirely.
How to Prosper in spite of that:
Now that you know how you’re doing both in in-person and online education, use your strengths to their full potential
Whenever you can, try to transform one kind of teaching to the other, the one you are doing better in
4. Failure is punished
Another thing that most world educational models have in common is the apprehension in terms of failure in all forms. Something otherwise framed as a normal stage of learning any skill, no matter how good you are in it, is turned into this scary monster students are terribly scared of.
Students get punished for giving the wrong answer.
For not being sure of their answer.
For phrasing a correct answer wrongly.
For daring to ask for clarification.
For questioning the purpose of the question.
How to Prosper in spite of that:
As weird as it sounds, try failing for a while!
By this I of course don’t mean do it on purpose, but try being more okay with the feeling of failure
Other people may not be so cool with this, because of their internalised fears, but it’s a good life skill to have, cause, brace for it…
… we all fail a lot
5. 12 years, then off to the shoe factory
It’s a widespread truth, but sometimes an overlooked one, how the current educational models mainly prepare you to be a factory worker. Not in the literal sense most of the time, but in the case where “factory worker” = “task-doing machine”.
When you think about it, most jobs in our economy boil down to following along a list of tasks, a set of instructions, really well. Yes, even surgeons, which is a good thing to be honest, creative surgeons tend to not get the best rep in the community.
In order to get successful in some more creative ventures, like design, business, IT even, you need to be able to think outside of the box, and this is where modern education often falls flat.
How to Prosper in spite of that:
If you see a problem encountered by many people, try thinking of a solution on your own
Try out debating! It really opened my eyes to a new world of thinking
Phew, this article really came from a deep place in my soul, I’ve wanted to write something education-related for a long while.
[8:13]
by Prince Ea