Trained to Fail
The real world may be a tiny bit different than the classroom — Your #1 Newsletter for Accelerated Learning
“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”
-Albert Einstein
How School Trains Us To Fail In The Real World
I’ve never let my school interfere with my education.
-Mark Twain
The modern American school system does not encompass or define learning, it is a dominant subset of it. Do you want to know why I dislike school? Homework, sure, but more important than that are these four ways that school trains us to fail in “the real world.”
Schools teach knowledge, but life requires wisdom
“Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.” — Sandara Carey
Instead of learning critical life skills on how to manage money, how to negotiate, or how to communicate, kids are mostly taught to memorize information. This is helpful to learn, but not at the cost of not learning critical life skills. Many people put these “life” skills on the onus of the parents to teach their kids, but not all parents are qualified to teach these lessons, and many assume that school is “enough learning.” The school system would be a perfect place to learn these indispensable skills.
I can’t give school a hall pass on this one, because it is set up as a core way that kids are prepared to live in the world. Why is it positioned as such when it lacks personal growth training, financial management training, communication training, emotional intelligence training, and healthy living training? Psychology is the closest course to any of these, but it’s mostly in college and typically optional.
You could come up with a few examples of where these skills are taught in school, or where some wisdom is imparted by a particularly great teacher. But this is a general problem of focus that schools have. Schools are not set up to teach us what matters most.
School (noun) — A place where students suck on an information teat instead of learning how to feed themselves.
-Stephen Guise
Trending Now…
Why ‘intelligence’ is a stupid concept — “One of my biggest issues with the modern day education system is the arbitrary delineation it creates between ‘intelligent’ and ‘non-intelligent’ students. From an early age, we’re told that the students who perform the best are the ones who are ‘naturally gifted’ — that they are simply born more intelligent than the rest of us.
In reality, top performers either put in more work (i.e. hours of study) or have more efficient ways of studying (i.e. are more productive). A 2013 study of 3,520 students found that the two biggest factors in achieving long-term academic success were motivation and study strategies — not ‘intelligence’.”
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“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable”
-Socrates
