Was school a waste of time?
Remember completely stressing out for that US History exam back in high school? Did it matter at all?
Formal schooling has a similar information overload as the internet.
Except it strongly determines where you’ll be placed in society. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the schooling backgrounds of the majority of celebrities. Scarlett Johansson attended NY’s Professional Children’s School — a private academy only costing $50,000.00/year to attend. Of course this doesn’t guarantee success, but it sure helps to start the race in front of the finish line.
What exactly did we learn in school? I’m sure the subjects you took were similar to the curriculum at most schools — social studies, history, economics, math, English, foreign language, and science. Unfortunately, all these subjects contain lots of information on topics employers are largely not impressed with. Try citing a Shakespeare soliloquy at your next job interview and see how far that gets you. When everyone takes the same repertoire, it’s tough for anyone to care how much of this stuff you know or remember.
Of course education and learning are important, but there’s a critical failure for teaching practical skills.
Sure, English is important to learn, read, and understand. But is diagramming a sentence really going to give you that edge over the next guy? Or spending hours reading Jane Eyre going to really get you ahead in life? What’s rarely emphasized is how powerful English can be used as a tool for establishing your own credibility. Or how to contact & convince journalists, editors, or news teams to actually read your work. Or how to optimize a blog to vibe with search engines for driving traffic to your article. After all, if no one reads your work, do you really need to learn English in the first place?
Not connecting the dots.
I bet you probably had to take a certain group of classes in high school. Foreign language? ‘World’ History? Maybe even Calculus. And these prepared you for college, where you probably still had to take some of these again. Now, I knew from day one of school what I liked and didn’t like. I knew I would never be fluent in Spanish, and history was somewhat painstaking to sit through. But I still had to spend hundreds of hours of my life begrudgingly sitting through all this to ‘make the grade.’ What for? There’s so much to learn in each subject area. And to become a professional or expert in anything, you need to put in that magic 10,000 hr number. Why delay this into early adulthood? Why not let students drop the areas they hate and pursue more diligently those which they excel or have passion? This type of education is encouraged at Montessori institutions and in Europe, but is largely unheard of in public schooling in the United States.
The information presented in school is largely a distraction — designed to test your ability to absorb and regurgitate information, with true understanding being optional.
Maybe you got an A in chemistry, but did you really understand how electron charges hop between atoms and form a charge-neutral compound?
Or where the charge even comes from in the first place? It’s okay if you don’t, but the point is, you simply memorized the information. After memorizing, you took the information on face value as true, and passed the exam, which asked for the same information your teacher already gave you. There was no time or space given for thinking really deeply about the mechanisms of charge transfer.
What skills would be useful?
Well, a place to start would be looking through the current job postings in various careers and seeing what is needed. You want to be a software engineer? The top skills needed by most employers are programming, coding, software development, object oriented design, debugging, and problem solving / logical thinking. Boom! These are the courses that should be emphasized and taught. And that’s it! Maybe 2–3 years of intense focus in these areas, and you’d be an amazing software engineer.
What if you find out that software engineering isn’t your thing? The nice thing about short, intense bursts of school is that it’s easier and not as costly to go back and try something else. You don’t have to spend another 4–5 years at another institution relearning the same material.
But surely you’ll miss well-roundedness.
This is a nice, feel good justification for formal schooling that carries about as much weight as anti-vaxxers. Exactly how well-rounded are professionals in their fields? To be among the best, you need to excel in ways that others do not. If everyone is ‘well-rounded’, that means everyone is around the same average level at everything, which is certainly not the truth. You’ll go farther if you sacrifice and put in the blood, sweat and tears needed to stand out and rise above the rest. A ‘well-rounded’ education may actually be the last thing you need to get ahead of the pack.
