The current traditional schooling system cannot be the end game
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The pandemic – and our subsequent zig-zagging between on campus and online school – has made education a big part of our family conversations recently. For many years I’ve been worried that old school education (pun intended as always) just cannot be the final, optimal system we invent as a human species. It has too many problems that should not be problems.
I remember trying to drop Afrikaans towards the end of High School. I was the top student in my class and already had two extra subjects (Computer Science and Advanced Mathematics). But of course, it was “not something I would be allowed to do”. When I asked the dreaded question of why, I was met with answers – I kid you not – like “Languages are important because you need to be able to communicate, to construct sentences etc”.
Give me a break. I think by age of the 17 I has figure out how spell and to sentences construct.
But schools had not figured out how to move from being factories that produces drones for society to places where young people can genuinely explore their natural curiosity and express their intelligent creativity.
And of course, now I’m reliving some of those frustrations through the lives of my daughters. There are minor annoyances. A teacher resigns and suddenly French becomes a “reading period” for two weeks. To more serious ones. Teenagers - whose circadian rhythms are biologically shifted from being larks to night owls - must simply comply with the old “be there at 7.25am” rules. So many rules and traditions that no one ever questions anymore because, well, that’s just the way school is supposed to be. But is it?
Intelligent, sophisticated human societies have been on this planet for thousands and thousands of years. In that time period it’s only the last couple hundred years that we’ve had the current school system.
The problem is once your parents had school that way, and you had school that way, it becomes too easy to just go along and assume that school has always been that way. And that it should always stay that way.
I applaud innovations – big and small – that push the boundaries and attempt to reinvent and override traditions. The national school of the arts. New online schools that are popping up. Micro schools. Technical high schools. All these are helping us as human beings break through the old and discover what lies beyond the limitations of the status quo.
I’ll end this Friday morning rant with a couple of my favourite quotes from one of the greatest educators the world has even seen. One Professor Richard Feynman…
“The problem is not people being uneducated. The problem is that people are educated just enough to believe what they have been taught, and not educated enough to question anything from what they have been taught.”
“Don't just teach your students to read. Teach them to question what they read, what they study. Teach them to doubt. Teach them to think.”