Are following instructions really important?
There is a growing feeling that something is wrong with the global education system. And it is proven that the education system is failing. And why is it actually failing? Well, parents are sending their children to school, so they can be prepared for the real world which nowadays is changing very, very fast but our schools haven’t changed much for hundreds of years. And I can bravely say, that the education system has got a lot of problems. One of them is Industrial age values. All day long students do nothing but follow instructions. “Sit down”; “Take out your books”; “Turn to page 69”; “Stop talking”. At school, you are rewarded for doing exactly what you are told. These are industrial-age values that were really important for factory workers. Their success depended on following instructions and doing exactly what they were told to do. But in today's world, how far can you go by simply following instructions? The modern world values people who can think outside of the box, people who are curious, and people who can collaborate with others.
Another problem is the lack of autonomy and control. At school, the students experience a complete lack of autonomy and control. Every minute of a student’s life is tightly controlled by the system. In today’s world, you are managing your own time. But life at school looks very different. The system is sending a dangerous message to its students that they are not in charge of their own lives. Experts such as Dan Pink and Peter Gray believe that autonomy is incredibly important for students.
There is something else as well. A major problem is known as inauthentic learning. Most of the learning that happens in schools today is not authentic, because it relies on memorization and rote learning. Every few months we are measured on how much of the material we have maintained. Such learning is not authentic, because most of it is gone two days after the exam. But it seems like that is the only thing we measure and test scores are the only thing we value. This has created an extremely unhealthy culture for students, parents, and teachers. Children are staying up all night memorizing useless facts that they will forget very soon.
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I am sure that all of us have got a passion for something, but as a student, you haven’t got much spare time for your favorite hobby. This is another problem I would like to talk about. Let’s call it “No room for passion and interests”. We have an extremely standardized system where every student has to learn the same thing in the exact same way as everyone else. This in my opinion doesn’t respect the basic fact of being human. Each of us is a unique and different human being in our own way. We all have different passions and interests. But do the schools help their students find their passion and develop it? NO! There seems to have no room in the current system for the most important questions in a child’s life. “What am I good at”; “How do I fit in this world?” The system doesn’t seem to give a damn about it. There are so many great people who failed in the traditional school system. Fortunately, they have managed to overcome these failures, but not everyone can. The school system doesn’t have an idea how many students it failed.
And as I have already said, each of us is different in our own way and this affects the way we learn. So, I would like to talk about the differences in how we learn. Each of us is also different in how we learn, how much time we take to learn something, and what tools work best for us. But unfortunately, the system doesn’t have room for such differences. So, if someone is a bit slow in learning something, he’s considered a failure, and let’s don’t forget the fact that the students are at different levels of understanding. Now, whatever the teacher does, there’s bound to be students, who are either bored, because they are ahead or confused because they are behind. Because of internet and the digital media, we have students have all of the information in the world at their fingertips. Technology has made it possible for anyone to learn anything. But the school system does not leverage these incredible resources for fear of losing control.
Another major problem is the fact that the school values efficiency over mastery and promotes an incomplete understanding of the subject material. The current education system operates as a factory. Students have a certain amount of time to get graded and they are either good products or bad products. The system moves students along after a certain period of time and not when they have fully mastered the current subject matter. In Sal Khan’s book called The One World Schoolhouse, he refers to this as Swiss cheese learning. Students are allowed to pass the next year's subject if they obtain a grade of at least 50%. That means that there is over 50% of the material they don’t understand. Eventually, all these holes will catch up to them and they will hit a point, where the material stops making sense. The analogy Sal uses is that of a house. You wouldn’t build a house on a weak foundation, would you? But The education system is constantly doing this to us, the students, by pushing us ahead regardless of our mastery over a topic. Again, the current school system is like a factory. It values quantity over quality. The world is evolving so rapidly that older institutions can’t keep up. But we are starting to see a shift in the education system. Here are some of my views on the future of education. Education will likely be digital, automated, and highly personalized for the individual. It will also be cheaper than ever before. We are already starting to see these things emerge with the birth of educational YouTube channels and the increasing quality of online courses. Universities are starting to put some of their notes online. Some are even starting to host massive online courses online. In the future students will reward the best educators with their attention and money and educators will start to compete to be the best. As a result, we will see an increase in the quality of education students get. And with no doubt, the road will be a difficult one. The roots of our current system run deep; the infrastructure is already there, meanwhile, the infrastructure for the future of education is still in its infancy. The online education system still doesn’t have the prestige that the traditional has although this model is shifting as well, no one’s going to hire a doctor or a lawyer who learned everything online, but they would hire a programmer, video editor, graphic designer, digital marketer, an animator or writer who learned everything online. And here is one final note that I would like to conclude on Human curiosity is very hard to kill. We are naturally very curious beings. And you can see that by analyzing little kids and seeing how they interact with the world around them. They are fascinated and they want to know how it all works and fits together. This is human nature. We can see that the current system is starting to show its age, because somehow miraculously it is putting out the flames of human curiosity in our youth. Young kids are seeing education as a chore and I think that most of us will agree that the current is outdated and will leave many students unprepared for a rapidly changing future. For them, I already feel sad. Although there’s still a lot of work to be done, I am quite optimistic about the future of our education. I am truly excited to see a world where we can bring back a system of education that allows students to find and use their natural talents to make the world around them a better place instead of having their natural curiosity… snuffed out.
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