Is there anything wrong with the educational system?

In the past days. I got into contact with some German students aged 14 to 18 and all of them told me they were suffering from the educational system in Germany.

Ranging from missed A levels to depressed students, I heard each and everything. But there was little to no praise in their words. They were complaining about being left behind and left alone with their problems.

If you’re not working as expected, there is no use for you in the society.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions students take away from school. Every student has his or her own potentials and he or she should be able to find and train them. If you’re raised with such wrong values and the applied pressure of ten to twelve years of school, things are going to break.

Based on the conversations I had with about 50 students across Germany, the baseline of the conversations were „There is clearly something wrong.“

I had some conversations with my former teachers and they told me students were not motivated as I was five years ago. Students are tired during the lessons and deliver worse results than I did five years ago. (And hell yeah, I delivered a lot of crap!)

I sense that a lot of students use mobile phones (or smart phones) today and due to the frequent use and short-lived interactions they take on on those (messaging, posting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, gaming, etc.) they have a tremendously shortened timespan in which they can concentrate. They are not interested in something for more than 15 minutes in a row, which is a third of a regular lesson in school.

Students are awarded online with likes, comments, views, followers, basically, it is gamificated. Who would not want the most friends, the most comments below a post or image? Why does it not work in school?

It feels like it would be too competitive to compare your own performance with those of your class mates in person. Years ago, you would have met after school and beat each other up. Today, you’re rather googling „How to DDoS“ to get an advantage towards your opponent in the online social media race.

There is a shift in today’s work culture. There are people called remote workers, things are happening asynchronously and distributed. Why are schools still working in a totally different way? Why do schools not adapt to this new culture? Just because the workplaces change so fast, this is no chance to wait for something to settle before schools start adapting. Because nothing will settle anymore. Not with the given technologies. Not in this disruptive (Oh, I said the „d“ word.) society.

If you stop adapting, you are soon left behind. But if students are not taught on how to adapt and keep up, they will never be a good co-worker for your company and damage your business.

This is what Steve Jobs once said in front of the students of the Stanford university students back in 2005:

Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.

Let’s work on this together. In being better parents, better teachers and better co-workers.

What are your experiences from when you were back in school or college? Do you have any stories to tell?