Schooling itself is schizophrenic.
schiz·o·phre·ni·a: a state characterized by the coexistence of contradictory or incompatible elements.
At some point, college became a necessary step in the standard progression of young lives in the West. It’s another four years of education after high school meant to maximize your competitiveness in the job market.
For most who follow this standard path, leaving college is the first time they are let loose into the “real world”… the chaotic, flawed, inconceivably complex, ever-changing world beyond the safety and structure of schooling. It’s the first time they are completely on their own to decide what to make of their lives, without constant input from parents and teachers.
School is Structured
Prior to that moment of entering the real world, the schooling apparatus has taken away from young people nearly all decision making, leaving only perhaps lunch options, friends, a few elective classes, and choice of college major. Students are trained to follow a narrow set of clearly marked paths.
College is a transitional period where students have typically escaped parental supervision, but the routine (classes, homework, tests) and isolation from the outside world are still intact. Then it’s as if, around age 22, graduates are dropped into a vacuum of guidance as they enter the workforce.
The World is Unstructured
Why is it not until age 22 that a student is confronting the true nature of the world? Can we give children a broad, empty canvas and free reign right from the beginning?
A vacuum… that’s how a meaningful life starts, right? A life that includes meaningful careers. You realize that there is no meaning…yet. You realize that your life is an empty vessel, and the only person that can fill it up is you. You start putting things in it, clumsily at first.
I know this now, but the kids don’t.
School is De-structive
Rather than teaching this critical lesson from the start, we manipulate and control kids from ages 6 to 18, mashing their beings into standardized templates of knowledge and skills, training them to quell their creative impulses and instead master obedience, teaching them emotional and intellectual dependency, only then to throw them into a world where the key to success is harnessing those very impulses that were squashed for 12 years.
That’s the fake-out of the last century.
Kids are forced to sit in chairs for 50 minutes at a time, arbitrarily grouped by age, force-fed information without any real context as to why it might be interesting. The teacher gets upset when students aren’t enthusiastically participating. But imagine if one kid does get excited about the lesson. Great! But then the bell rings and it’s time to drop that excitement and move on to the next class. Sounds like emotional abuse to me.
This particular example—the merciless schedule—isn’t about the joy of learning, it’s about teaching obedience; specifically, obediently pretending to be interested in something for a finite period of time. In other words, one of the lessons of schooling is how to be fake, among other destructive lessons.
For twelve years we teach kids to surrender all substantial decision making to adults. Then, in college, they are suddenly challenged to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives. How ridiculous! It’s a shocking flip-flop.
What an oversight it is to let some kids believe they need to choose a lifelong career at that point. A wise, more experienced person would chip in this advice:
“Don’t worry about deciding what you want to do for the rest of your life. Just decide what you want to do for the next year while you gather more information.”
Personally, I haven’t heard anyone say that.
