School System
Read time: 9 minutes
School has been a controversial topic in the past few years. Most people have started wondering if school actually brings any benefit to young people. The pandemic hasn’t been helpful either, seeing how everyone stumbled into the next academic year by attending a glorified masterclass for which we paid much more than we would have for an actual masterclass.
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” – Albert Einstein
History of school
Schools as we know them today were first invented in the 19th century for the public education of peasantry and the ability of people to use machinery and do specialized work. Beforehand, we had a system that was much closer to home-schooling.
The rich among us would be able to pay for the services of highly educated teachers. Since only the rich were able to get educated that would promote the saying “rich getting richer, poor getting poorer”.
For the longest time in human history, we have never had compulsory education. As education began to be seen as a universal human right, we started to allow everyone to get schooled. Slowly, but surely, higher level academia started opening its doors for lower and lower classes, building dormitories, offering social scholarships and recognizing the opportunity of preparing more and more specialized workers.
Such an opportunity obviously offered lower classes a much higher opportunity at life. If your whole family tree had been composed of farmers, you did not have to have the same faith. You could get educated, you could change the city where you live, you could be around people making 100 times, 1000 times more than your family would make at home.
Schools and academia have been around for thousands of years in different forms. No matter how they looked, they always stood for something. They always stood high as a symbol of respect, as a very important institution in the society they were a part of, schools always represented intellectual enlighten and hopefulness for a brighter future.
“They know enough who know how to learn.” – Henry Adams
On specialization
Most of us have probably wondered “But why do I have to go through this geography / history / biology class? I already know what I like and what I want to do in life! Why do I have to go through these useless classes?!”
In the modern world where we are taught to appreciate specialization, to thrive for it, we believe that being an expert in a particular field will be a huge advantage in keeping a job. We believe that if we are good enough, we will have a lot of money, job prospects and career opportunities.
A report from Dell Technologies has been released saying “85 per cent of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven't even been invented yet”. How, then, can we even start to specialize in something that doesn’t even exist yet? How can we even begin to teach our children to prepare for such careers?
The answer: We cannot.
We have to be focusing way less on specialization and more on generalism. We have to learn not how to be a professional in the field, but rather how we can adapt to the job opportunities and to the current socio-economical market.
The real super power of the 21st century is not specialization, or a very broad skillset, but rather the ability to mold our existing knowledge to best adapt to what we are currently doing, the power to stay focused, the mindset of growth and the openness to change one’s mind.
DISCLAIMER: There a few jobs (doctor, lawyer, accountant, airplane pilot) for which traditional school specialization is still required and I hope from the bottom of my heart those still will be and we will never have an ex-truck driver (who has been fired due to automation after 45 years of driving a truck) try to perform surgery on us.
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” ― Alvin Toffler
The future of education
As we have said in the beginning, online schooling, this pandemic induced online masterclass, has shown us how broken the school system is.
The repetitive classes, the useless way we assess the ability to remember rather than the ability to perform, the lack of interest of most teachers and higher-level academia.
We cannot continue in the 21st century with a model of school that has been creating hundreds of years. We need adapt, or we will slowly lose our futures, we will slowly lose the reliability of academia, we will begin to have less and less opportunities for those born in the countryside.
We need to change. I, by no means have all the answers, but I have a few suggestions:
1.Start with the students, not the teachers
In Romania we have a saying: “The fish goes bad from the head, but must be cleared from the tail”.
We simply cannot make a top-down decision that we hope will ripple in all the right ways.
In order to have real change in schools, we must start it from the bottom, WE, THE STUDENTS must act.
It does not matter that this is not in your job description. It’s your future that we are talking about. We must take the matter in our own hands.
2.Don’t rely on school to teach you everything
No matter how good your school may be right now, there is much more to learn outside of school. The extracurricular activities are usually what will shape you the most. Schools and universities should celebrate such activities, they should reward and incentivize them for students.
3.Make the “adult duties” a mandatory course
I do not know about you, but I never learned about emotional intelligence, how to properly do my taxes, what to look for when buying an apartment, how to budget or how to have a proper hiring interview.
The institution that is supposed to be our one stop educational buffet has to offer the most basic of adult duties.
4.Talk about it
Nobody has all of the answers. In such a volatile world, where our parent’s jobs look nothing like ours, and neither will our jobs in 20 years, nobody can know how to prepare for the future.
Nobody has the answers, as much as we would love to boldly pump our chest and say “but I know how the future will look like”.
The schools of the future have to be as volatile as the environment we will be living in. We have to relax the level of rigidity that we now have in schools and be prepared to really listen to our students, to learn from them, to go after their needs and to be prepared to incorporate within a few months any feedback that we receive from students.
I hope you will be better prepared than we were for our future, I hope you are the ones that will take the matter in your own hands.
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You are on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go...” ― Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Photo credits:
Photo by Vasily Koloda on Unsplash
Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash