Outdated Education: Why Traditional Education is Mostly Worthless
Edgar is 18 years old. He is not aware that his educational experiences are not interwoven with his world. When Edgar goes to history class, he perceives those historic facts as irrelevant (and boring). The reason for this, in Albert Einstein’s words, is because the educational curriculum is based, mostly, on “dead knowledge.” According to the theoretical physicist (1988),
“sometimes one sees in the school simply the instrument for transferring a certain maximum quality of knowledge to the growing generation. But that is not right. Knowledge is dead; the school, however, serves the living” (p. 60).
Einstein’s claim points out the main idea of this article. The traditional school system does an inadequate role in establishing functional knowledge and strategies to sensitize the individual to different aspects of the physical and social environment. Thus, here I establish that those skills, that are absent in most traditional schools, are vital for self-improvement. Before advancing any further, we must unpack some background details about how society has been changing over the years, and how those changes have influenced our way of thinking and perceiving the world.
Even though social changes have always been present in humankind, this does not imply that the pace of those changes has always been equivalent to each era. An individual born in the agricultural era knew beforehand what his job would be for the rest of his/her life. For example, if Edgar were born in the agriculture epoch (13,000 years ago) his main task wouldn’t be that different from his parents, harvesting seeds and raising livestock. This is not the case in the XXI Century. Because jobs, and their requirements, will keep changing along with technological progress,
“the future belongs to those organizations, as well as those individuals, that have made an active, lifelong commitment to continue to learn” (Gardner, 2008, p. xviii).
If I had decided to restrict myself to the knowledge and skills that I acquired in my academic formation, I would be out of the picture in a blink of an eye. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit Puerto Rico, in mid-March 2020, it forced academic institutions to operate remotely to prevent the spreading of the virus. Some of the old-school-academic-personnel, that were used to the traditional method of teaching, decided to quit or retire. In a blink of an eye, you had to master new applications, software, and teaching methodologies that many consider unnecessary or not essential before the crisis. Those who cannot manage the mental stress and frustration were unable to adapt to the “New Reality.”
In his book, AI Super-Powers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, Kai-Fu Lee addresses that “based on the current [2018] trends in technology advancement and adoption…within fifteen years, artificial intelligence will technically be able to replace around 40 to 50 percent of jobs in the United States” (Lee, 2018, p. 19). However, here I don’t intend to argue about the possibility of an end-of-work-era. But what we should have in mind is that the future, of course, won’t be as the present is. Technological progress will continue, either with or without pandemics — that is for sure. Therefore, future generations must be able to cope with continuous social and technological changes. In such a world, resilience to cope with those constant chances must be a fundamental topic of discussion within educational institutions.
Harari (2018) proposed that “people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world” (p. 265). It is hard to maintain that contemporary post-secondary educational curriculums are interwoven with those statements mentioned above. Despite substantial evidence, it should be noted that most academic institutions continue to follow outdated curriculums.
Fortunately, educators such as Hayes (2010) have been writing about this matter. The author argued that if we are planning to form functional members for a democratic society, a new essential curriculum must be established. Are we preparing students for the future? Or are we “preparing” the growing generation for 1991?
*This is a excerpt from the book The Shortcut Generation by Christian Valentín
References
Einstein, A. (1988). Ideas an opinions. Bonanza Books.
Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence reframed. Basic Books.
Harari, Y. (2018). 21 lessons for the 21st century. Spiegel & Grau.
Hayes, H. (2010). Curriculum 21 essential education for a changing world. ASD.
Lee, K. (2019). AI super-powers: China, silicon valley and the new world order. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
