*FREE BOOK*: A Short Education Testimony
One student’s take on sustainable learning, objectiveness, success measures, and the future of education!
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Chapter 1: Introduction
Not just the level of knowledge but also the IQ dropped in the last 50 years massively. In Asia, especially China and Japan, the IQ rose. The art of educating kids right becomes more important than ever, not just because education has always been important and a way to get better jobs but because times will get rougher. Our world will not forever be in shape it is today. I lived in China, I lived in the United States and Germany. I’ve been visiting and attending schools all over the world.
I’ve been elected schools representative in Berlin, Germany’s capital. Talked about education on national television in the United States, China, USA and Poland, lead several student organizations and committees, worked together with prestigious institutions and well known politicians on making education better and more sustainable for already more than half a decade. I love education so much that I build several companies around it and spend almost all day long thinking about education, actively changing it, and making it more sustainable for future generations. In this medium book, I will give you a detailed guide on how to properly educate yourself or your kids properly. This book will give you insights in how education worked in the past, works at the moment and what it will look like in the future. I will not hold anything back to only let you know the hard truth. The hard truth is not satisfying but if you act right, you can change it in your odds. If you understand this book and diligently study it, you will not how maneuver through life successfully and how to seek proper education. Because fact of the matter is that most of the education offered online is not more than a promotion by the one who created it. People don’t want to educate you, they want to sell you their product. And it’s occurring everywhere, you cannot even read an article anymore on the internet without being liked to an external platform that wants to sell you their product. More and more the sale of books gets decentralized from the book shop to the mainstream audience via Amazon Kindle, lulu or smashwords. The problem is not just the amount of content but the fact that the internet gives the opportunity to publish everything the publisher wants without checking the content published on correctness. It is scaring that there are more than 3000 books published every day. And I promise you most of them aren’t hardbacks or aren’t even available in that form. Most of the books published nowadays are published over the internet without any publisher. But, the process of publishing and books in general aren’t the major problem. The major problem is the deficit of education that brings true value and benefit to its student. Publishing platforms for video courses have been rising for the last couple of years and gained quite some momentum and become major players in the education industry. At the same time private schools, schools for extra curricular education and especially language schools are opening up and closing down faster than you can say “education doesn’t benefit the student anymore”. Real human beings earn less and less teaching person to person or even sometimes stop doing it overall. It is much more attractive to teach on the internet or make money via passive income through publishing educational content. Teachers become blogger, blogger become teachers. Everyone can become a teacher now. You don’t need any certificate to be a “professional” or “experienced” teacher on the internet. There are many good but also many bad side effects of the current development. On one hand, it is fascinating how many people can actually make a living by teaching online or publish educational content that seriously benefits its reader without needing any special license. On the other hand, we should question ourselves whether the digitalization of education is a favorable development. From an education developments expert’s perspective, such as mine, seeking education through non-electronic ways, benefits the human brain and overall intelligence more than fast learning, compressed online education in the overall sense. Their are some sources that I could seriously recommend, such as Quora or educio, but most sources actually just waste your time. Most people spend more time looking for proper education than actually finding and studying it. Think about your own behavior. How often have you been skimming Wikipedia pages only to afterward know that there was nothin gon the page that brought you any benefit? How often have you been reason articles about business, productivity or health, only to discover afterward that you already knew about all these things? It is time to take education to another level: applied education! Universities, even sometimes high schools, are most of the time only about one thing: Who will I meet? People dont go to Harvard University because they seek the great education but because they believe they will meet people that will later in life help them to become rich and successful. I bet you anything that a student in Ulan Batar in Mongolia can get the same education at his university as offered at Harvard University. Students of any ages seek knowledge they can use in life but at the same time meet people who have the skill set they believe is valuable for them. In this book we will discover great ways how to educate yourself and where great education should start. So let’s dive right in…
Chapter 2: The Foundation for Good Education
How makes education great? The foundation for good education is the ability of a teacher to self-motivate the student. No education is valuable if it doesn’t motivate the student to study it. Ask yourself: Why do we work? What drives us? We live in a world where more than a million photos get taken every second. Some of them at the dinner with friends with some nice champagne, some in the new car we just bought or some with a really handsome guy or a really hot chic in the arms. We go out and workout in order to get to a specific goal that is often not even related to the exercise we do. We earn money not to have a lot of money but to get the girls/guys we want. We work out to impress others and of course to get the girls/guys, not because we always believed that a six pack is the most beautiful thing we have ever seen. The same thing applies to education. We educate ourselves in order to get the dream job, not because we want to desperately know the knowledge. “Would you rather learn or relax?” describes the point very well. Most people would choose relax, some people would choose learn. We expect a 50/50 result. But why is that? Most of us are so into the idea that learning benefits us and can be fun that we chose it over relaxing. In the end, it is a fact that the human mind is rather lazy than vivid and knowledge-hungry. We just connect our learning with goals. That’s why we seek more education and believe relaxing does not bring us anywhere. Many people get “relaxing” and “doing nothing” together, which is often not true. Our unconsciousness is the idea factory of our senses and for sure has been the reason why humanity has been advancing since the Stone Age. But now the “zero free time hustling mentality” puts many great ideas to rest. Educational content or any other content put out online, decreased in value since the beginning of the internet. We reverse engineered evolution and create the machine that increases stupidity naturally decade by decade: the internet. Because we consume content quicker every second, we give less attention to the detail. A one-sided, one-cultured society in one space teaching each other. That’s the current state of the internet with the difference that the level of knowledge is not homogenous yet because it gets fueled by newcomers and outside content. As soon as society enters the phase of everyone being on the internet, no cultures will exist anymore. It is thus the task of the teacher to educate a student to seek knowledge of high quality. Making sure that the student can in the bigger picture differentiate between what knowledge is important what knowledge is not, is the key to seeking true knowledge about the world.
What most educators don’t consider teaching their students furthermore is the self-evaluation process because it cannot be taught on paper. It is about experience. Self-evaluation does not come from correcting a test paper but working with one internationally recognizable unit: money. In order to educate students properly, they must apply their gained knowledge to the real world, not to examples in their text books. It is the task of the teacher, to let the students look at their score looking back at them: the number on their bank account. Money cannot be a good measure to describe the success of a non-profit/humanitarian organization or socially motivated operations but is in most cases a valuable measure of educational success. It is thus the obligation of the teacher to make the importance of money clear to the student. Money will instantly set them in competition with the global community and will build a base for future success.
Every subject can be applied to the essence of making money: the profitable idea. Building a construct around the idea is the most valuable construct anyone could build. The students will use their critical thinking skills, develop a sense of objectiveness, and thus get a clearer view on people, societies and the connections that exist worldwide. Using the internet in order to gain access to these connections is also one of the major assets every student should be able to understand. Not using power of the internet is not being objective. Everyone who is not objective should not be teacher, and will not be a good student at any point in life. The lack of objectiveness has been increasing over time because their have been more and more ways to not be objective and still make it in life. But because the situation is worsening and the globalization of information technology does not stop and does scratch on the doors of its last frontiers, such as China, the necessity of intense objectiveness becomes inevitable.
Even Ivy League universities know that teachers are often not as objective as they should be, that there is fluctuation in grades and that students from different schools are not comparable in terms of grades. That’s why Ivy League schools are interested in students’ extracurricular activities and their degree of success in those. The market is completely objective and the only current measure to reasonably determine success. That’s why it should be the interest of every institution to not just determine the student’s intelligence by its grades in school but also his success in the market. Applying education is the most underrated skill we currently have. In China, students study 16 hours a day. Many of these hours they study English. Chinese people cant understand anything that is written in English and after ten years of practice cannot even introduce themselves in English. They struggle telling the time, describing simple things, and don’t even question their learning process.
It is inevitable that the foundation for sustainable learning has not been laid. In the United States, Congress regularly passes bills that limit the free time of students and bases on a philosophy of no free time at all. The development of progressive thinking is vanishing. Schools and universities don’t enrich the thinking anymore but destroy any sense of creativity. Thus it should be the objective of future generations to not just teach knowledge but develop creative thinking to such an extend that student favor applying things they learned over hanging around at home doing nothing. Especially in the West where almost everyone has a reasonable chance to go to college, education lacks motivation. More and more students ask their teachers: Why do I have to study this? How will it help me in life? On the other hand what we need in life is not being taught and if we don’t do it, we will be punished. No one teaches us how to do taxes but if we don’t do it, we go to jail. It is on the student to determine what’s important to learn, thus it must be the objective of any school to encourage him to develop his creative sense and will to find out things himself. It is a circle. The students have bad teachers, thus they will be bad teachers themselves one day. Striving for academic greatness has become less important and got trumped by looks and outward impression. In order to build a great fundament for a proper learning experience, a teacher needs to rap up knowledge in bitty pieces. Every student needs to get perspective of what is ahead and should not be scared of what will be taught to him. There is no sense in being unfriendly to students as many teachers are right now. “I was being hard to you, that’s the only way you will get better.” No, it’s just not. Too many students are too frustrated and sometimes even too scared of school to properly learn anything. The teacher needs to force students to be very respectful to each other and thus needs to be respectful himself. School should be about fun, striving for greatness, an togetherness. Taking education for granted is the wrong perspective but making education unenjoyable is the wrong approach as well. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden do a good job on their students’ level of education and the idea behind it. Students know where the education will bring them and have the freedom in school that makes it feel like a second home for them. In order to educate yourself or your students well, it is time to recognize that schools should not be a place that students fear to go to. Who came up with the idea to make education insanely boring and the place where it’s being taught the most unattractive of all? Every tooth dentist’s waiting room looks better and more welcoming than an average classroom. At a dentist, you might have the opportunity to read a newspaper, enjoy a cup of tea or just check your phone via free wifi. Schools often take as an argument that students would destroy things and the school must afterwards come up with the cost. That is a lie and everyone knows it. Because schools are being led by people who were not smart enough to teach at a university (or often not even get a proper degree) and have no other skills and experience in life than studying from the book about a matter that exists in the real world, education is not evolving. It is time to exchange stupid people with good people. There is no other way to change the process our educational system undergoes currently, than this one. Why educate our youth by people who are plain uneducated? You must not just evaluate the education itself but the one who created it. When someone on the internet teaches you about business, did this person ever build up a respectable business? Does this person have the right skills? Not just in school but also at home at your laptop or while you read a book evaluate the person who is teaching you and evaluate the material itself. Is it worth studying?
The essence of good education is thus having a good educator. It will take you more time finding a good educator than studying his/her educational content. But, it is definitely worth it.
In summary a good basis for your learning experience is finding someone who reached a level of education that consists of education by book and education by practice. At the same time, if you don’t like studying from the internet or on your own, it is necessary to find an institution that bases its values on a family-like environment. The learning process must be difficult, should not let any information out and it must apply to the real world. To determine success, money must be used in most cases as the only measure to determine the value of the education and the ability of the student to apply what he/she learned. The education provided must be of highest quality and being taught by well educated people.
Chapter 3: Appreciating Education
Students go to school and complain about the schedule, they complain about the teachers, and they complain about the fact that they cannot apply what they learned in class in the real world. It bothers students that they have to go to class every day, and every year they have to learn things they have no interest in. And, the students’ complains are reasonable. Why should they? The two most plausible answers would be that everyone should have a basic knowledge of how our world works and that students must be prepared for any profession. The argumentation makes sense but it is still not an explanation of why students hate school. Chinese students go to school and never complain, in contrast to students in the Western world they also have a more busy schedule than any student in the West. The only reason why Chinese students are such hard studiers is that the society is putting a lot of pressure of them. A rising middle class and nevertheless a tremendous income gap between the poorer class and the richer class of people, let’s students work diligently without questioning the system. That thought construct is smart but not recommendable. But, it goes in the right direction; Students appreciate that a teacher teaches them things because they know where it will lead them. Most students in the west are completely clueless about where to go in the future. Our system furthermore shows us that it is okay to not work, someone will always help you. The only one in China who might help you if you don’t have a job, is your family. But probably, no one will. Students don’t complain if the teacher talks five minutes longer than class time allows it. The main difference between them and the students in the West is that the momentum carries them. Everyone in China wants to become successful. Completely objectively spoken, it is much easier in China to get beautiful girls if you are very smart, rich, or both. If you go to Beijing, you will discover that many very young beautiful girls, often in their teens and twenties, coupling with man in their 40’s and 50's.
Everyone knows it, no one complains about it. It is a widely known fact that money and intelligence can get you anything. Thus students give their best every day to reach that goal of having beautiful girls and sports cars (in order to get girls). On the other side, girls really care about their looks and especially that they are thin. The Chinese beauty ideal is not curvy but seriously thin. Appreciating education helps making dreams come true. That’s how the education system should be shaped. Students must appreciate that someone teaches them their knowledge and must be respectful with the person who teaches it. It is not recommendable to shape a society on materialistic values but the educational sphere should make students aware of materialistic goods and thus create a strong inner drive for success.
Chapter 4: Helping Each Other
Modern day’s schools like competition. Being in a competition is often being misunderstood. The real world is often not a one against one battle over only one subject but an intellectual game of intelligence, velocity, or bravery. School should be a place to unify, the market should be the place to compete. Students will not be prepared for the market but will be in it all the time. Students should be encouraged to produce goods themselves, offer a service or do anything else to make money in the market. In order to strive for greatness, students must help each other. But, it needs organization and a measure if how much help you give and how much help you receive: money. Paying for help should not be taken as a bad behavior but an encouraged thing to do. It teaches students about supply and demand and how to develop a objective view on the world and its own strengths and weaknesses. How else will we ever find out what we are good at without having any measure except personal feelings? Feelings are often misleading. The student must find out his strengths and find a way through the education offered to become the best at this one skill. As soon as we wrap our heads around the idea that money is a measurable unit for success, our world will go over again in a phase of great inventions and immense productivity. Helping each other will be a major step to get there but help needs a reasonable ratio. Some students will always give help, some students will never help anyone. In a world where everyone strives for greatness, students will figure out things rather individually and will create things together from well-thought through ideas. Help is for many students only a way to get ahead by doing less. It must be a teacher’a obligation to help a student whatever question he/she may have. It thus also must be the students objective to ask questions. Teachers must work for their pay.
In a school that educates students to be profitable, it is not impossible to make students millionaires before they leave high school. Students are capable of more than most people think, if they are educated properly from a very young age.
Chapter 5: A School’s Monetary Fund
In order to learn properly, people must understand the importance of money in school. The school should not be dependent on the help of the government but should rely on its own assets: their students. It is important that every student develops entrepreneurial thinking and comes up with profitable ideas. Whether it is teaching physics online, writing books and marketing them or build up a company that gets led and supported by the school. The principal of every school, as done in the United Kingdom, should be the founder of a company himself. It is not about connecting his/her company with the school but about the mental capability of evaluating ideas and making sure that they are doable. Students must work for the school and the school must work for the students. Every school must provide ways and support to build student companies, book writing classes and so forth for every possible subject, so that everyone can make his profession profitable and gains experience. It is the task of the school to give experience down to its students by offering classes for every kind of interest. The school will soon be able to finance itself through the work of students. And, the students will be ahead of everyone else in any part of the world.
Chapter 6: Creating A Proper Curriculum
It is important that students learn at least 4 languages properly. The languages that make the most sense to learn at the moment are English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic/French/Russian. English, Chinese and Spanish must be obligatory, Arabic/French/Russian should be studied as well (at least one of them). Studying languages should not be a class but the knowledge should be acquired (after three years of diligently studying it) by speaking, reading and writing it every day. It thus must be the obligation of the school to be at least trilingual and to send students abroad in order to get in touch with other cultures and to enrich their students’ knowledge base even more. Languages should not be learned before the age of 8 because kids need to have a long and self-discovering childhood in order to enforce students to naturally think creatively.
No class at any age should be spend with not studying. It is much easier to acquire knowledge than you think and it is possible to study much harder without being extra stressed. Teachers just waste too much time by being unprepared, by talking about personal things, and lowering the speed of every class because some students don’t understand a part of the taught knowledge. If a teacher explains properly and the students pay attention, their should almost never be any case of a student not understanding the knowledge taught. It is much easier than most people think to teach properly. It just needs a very detailed mindful plan and proper breaking-down process of complicated material. It then also needs a vivid discussion between students and teachers in order to improve teaching material. No time is allowed to be wasted.
It needs every day fitness, a combination of running and weight lifting combined with a very healthy diet to improve the students mental capabilities and to get them ahead of the global competition. It thus needs a strong but loving and caring hand in order to lead students. In order to get the fullest out of the students it needs relaxing periods and at least 9 hours of sleep a day. In a school that profits from its students, it must be the objective to give as much back to the students as possible. Great food, a spa resort in the school and great other opportunities to develop further skills.
No school should have a focus skill. Every student must be able to find his/her own by trying out ideas in the market and forecasting future success in that field.
Chapter 7: Love & Friendship in School
Love is essential to develop a students’ skills. Many great technologies were invented to impress the other sex.
Students must have the opportunity to educate themselves about their own sexuality. Not from books but in the real world. Too many schools don’t allow sexual behavior. Nevertheless students always find a way around it. So why forbidding it in the first place? School should prepare for the real world. Thus it must be task of the school to not hold too much back that could happen to the students in real life. Students should be as free as possible in their free time in order to be focussed in school and develop character. In China, students are not allowed to have a partner and must study all evening long, every day of the week, for almost the entire year. Chinese students are no individuals. Everyone seems the same in behavior, looks, and interests. They will never take higher positions in the western world because they lack the overall ability to apply studied knowledge and never went out in the real world. When Chinese students leave university, they most of the time take low paying jobs because they never learned how to live a normal life. They never had a girlfriend, never fell in love, and never learned how to persuade the other sex, a seriously valuable skill and meaningful for any kind of business talk. There is more than just love that can be learned in a relationship. Think about the aspect of kindness, respect, and service. Chinese students will never know how to serve other people well without studying it from books. Having a partner will teach you all these skills quicker and more sustainable than studying it from books. No one should study his own life from books. There is no reason for living then…
Chapter 8: School Uniform
Wearing a school uniform is a necessity and should be encouraged at every school. But, students must have the freedom to wear the clothes they want to wear, even though they visit a boarding school or have school on the weekend. On the weekends, student should be able to experience with their own style and should have they freedom to choose what they wear. During the weak, students should focus on their work and must not focus on their looks. The more students focus on their looks during school, the more they get distracted and later fail in life. The school of the future must bring back mental greatness and pure intellect. Everyone can become intelligent. It just needs the right education, food, activities, fitness and lifestyle in everyone’s childhood. In the end, wearing a school uniform also makes sense because it creates school spirit and does not make poorer students be jealous of richer or just better looking students. It also creates a feeling of togetherness and also often, school uniform is much more comfortable to wear than clothes we would normally wear in the street. Using make up, hair gel, perfume or any other beauty product, should be allowed. A school should not be a prison.
