How education discriminates children in favor of adults

Education is such a broad topic that it can’t be covered in a single article, not even in a single book. Nevertheless, I must say that today education discriminates against children in schools and universities.

Let’s make a parallel analysis of both the participants in education and the environment where education happens, so that we could see how things are going today.

The Participants in Education

Generally speaking, education should be a life-long journey. Whether it is or it isn’t, each person should answer to themselves. But let’s analyze the two grand categories of participants in education: children and adults.

Children

By “children” I mean those people who are not yet psychologically mature. And although some individuals do not mature even in their fourties, we’ll generalize “children” to be individuals that attend some formal education institution (school, college, university, etc).

Children are in active development throughout the first two decades of their life. School-age children (6–12 years) are gradually becoming more independent. And besides learning school subjects, they start to learn and develop understanding of important concepts such as self-discipline, social skills and more.

Then, in their teens (13–18 years), they continue to learn school stuff, life stuff (problem solving of real life situations, financial management, etc.) and tune their existing skills (social, self-discipline, etc.)

During childhood and their teens, children are forming their personalities. In this period they are very susceptible to the world around them and tend to form conclusions, tend to learn from what happens with them and people around them.

Adults

The notion of “adult” is a vague one and each person understands it in their own way. In order to be on the same page, for this article let’s consider adults to be those people who have (recently or for a long time) graduated from an educational institution and do not attend any other formal education insitution.

In general, adults (consider those who are 30+ years old as well) are individuals with already an established personality and who can take care of themselves.

This being said about the participants in education, let’s analyze the second aspect — the environment.

The Education’s Environment

There are many ways and places to teach someone something. However, we will address the common methods and places used in most cases.

Children

For children we have schools/colleges/universities. Sadly, most schools represent the place where, besides learning good things about school subjects, children learn some awful lessons about life skills.

One of the most unnecessary “skill” of those is fear of mistakes. It is being taught and constantly reinforced by teachers who penalize mistakes throughout years of attending school.

You’ve done a mistake? You’re WRONG!

Didn’t get the correct result? PENALTY!

Don’t know how to solve the problem? You’re STUPID!

Can’t make the exercise? PENALTY!

You have another opinion? It is WRONG!

In the end, you learn to avoid mistakes and even to fear them, because they bring you trouble.

The environment at formal education institutions in most of the cases is very stressful, and this stress affects children in various ways. Moreover, the situation is being worsen by parents and relatives with their “Your whole life depends on it” attitude.

Right now, formal education is all about getting higher grades, rather than gaining understanding of the topic.

Adults

The image here is radically different from the children’s environment. For adults we have trainings, seminars, workshops, with a friendly atmosphere, anecdotes and coffee breaks.

During these seminars, nobody ever will say that you’re stupid, or will apply you penalties.

Moreover, if you know everything, it’s great. But even when you don’t know something, or you make a mistake in a simulation, you can often hear:

It’s a great example from which we all can learn something. Who can tell how we can prevent or overcome this situation when it happens in real life?

In these simulations, mistakes are good, as they serve as a foundation for further learning. The trainer takes the mistake and analyzes it, analyzes why it happened, what caused it and then explains how it can be corrected.

Putting everything together

So what do we have?

On one hand, we have vulnerable children that are in active development (both mentally and physically) that are like sponges, learning from everything happens to them. Every event they are involved in, every word spoken to them and every situation they find themselves in shapes their personality and who they are.
These children are put in an environment that is full of stress and negativity. They grow, learning there is something wrong with themselves, because they make mistakes.

On the other hand, we have adults. Mature individuals with formed personalities (with exceptions, of course) to whom you’d better not say anything negative about them, otherwise you’ll regret about it.
These adults’ learning environment often uses their own mistakes to better explain the material and this aproach is perfectly fine and acceptable for all.

And the most curious fact is that this transition, from child -> adult happens instantaneously. You have graduated, got employed and *snap*, whenever you go to your first training you’re treated with respect and whatever you do — there’s a valuable lesson people can learn from you.

Don’t you find this unfair? Those that we ought to protect, we punish. And we do so in such a wrong way and in a very inapropriate period of their lives.

A real case

Some time ago I have been involved as a mentor and technical agenda responsible in a programming summer camp for girls (16 to 20 years old). They had to learn how to develop a web site in two weeks. If you have ever programmed in your life, you know that no matter how much experience you have, there will always be errors in your code (if you didn’t program, now you know one of the most secret truths of programming). However, these girls were afraid of errors. Whenever one appeared, they got blocked and it was hard for them to proceed. We had to take some time to first address the fact that mistakes are ok, that they contain a lot of information about how to get eliminated. Besides this, whenever a trainer made a mistake themselves, we were reinforcing the message that mistakes do appear even at people who have experience. And then the learning process went smoother.

Call to action

Do not punish children for their mistakes. In most cases they do these mistakes out of lack of experience. Talk to them, explain what they did and why it is bad/not ok/wrong/etc. Teach your kids to analyze their mistakes and learn from them. Encourage their effort, do not penalize it.

We all make mistakes. Adults at their workplaces make mistakes, lots of them. Some of these mistakes have very bad concequences, but there are harmless mistakes as well. They’re just a component of our learning process.

In the end, it is not wrong to make mistakes, it is wrong to not learn from them.