School is sort of useless
Submitted by Rimu Atkinson on Mon, 08/06/2009 - 21:22
It's pretty clear to most people that kids learn the wrong stuff at school. Tonight I was pleased to come across a succint and clear description of a couple of the gaping holes: Here's what schools don't teach kids:
- Anything about money.
- How businesses work, so that they enter the game with no knowledge of how it's played.
- Basic psychology, so that even if they understand the game, they can be effectively gamed. Obviously, psychology would be very useful in raising kids.
- Parenting, other than what they learned by living (courtesy of parents, teachers, ministers, coaches, police ..) so they repeat all prior mistakes.
- Collaboration and team effort.
Here's what they learn.
- There is only one right answer to each question.
- Your success is entirely based on your grades and obedience/attendance.
- There are no new ideas. Everything you know is in books, according to a curriculum approved by committee.
- Creativity, taking your time and questioning authority and status quo are punishable offenses.
- Sharing information with others is punishable by expulsion.
- Ethics are OK to talk about, but in real life, everything's fair; just don't get caught.
You can see the result. Roughly 10% of people are "successful" and innovation comes from roughly 1%. 90% of work is meant to make the boss happy, and 10% towards customers, teamwork is unheard of and requires expensive consultants to achieve at a minimal level, and you're paid almost entirely for your paper certificates and longevity. (stolen from the comments section of an interesting blog post)
Comments
... that we home school!
I have said that I don't want our daughter to go to school and this gives me lots of good reasons why I have felt uncomfortable about it, on top of the ones I already knew.
Problem is as a society we use schools as a baby sitting servicee so all the kids my daughter might otherwise be socialising with are shut up in classrooms being fed crap.
We need to recreate a different sort of community.
Hmmm, some of my best teachers from high school were two of my science teachers and while they taught immovable facts from a text book, they encouraged a way of thinking to challenge everything (established wisdom) and don't just accept what you are told. Question everything. Research it. Understand it.
I don't necessarily think it is the syllabus that is completely at fault, although that does bear a large burden of responsibility. Of course, if I think of how many teachers I had over the years at high school and how many were of this echelon...it was quite minimal.
I recall one day our 3rd form science class being asked if we had been overseas.
Someone said "I have" and our teacher asked "How do you know?".
Girl responded, "I took a flight to Australia",
"Ah, but how do you know you really went to Australia?"
"Well, we flew over a large amount of water and everyone spoke funny when we got there :-)"
"Ah, but how do you know for sure that they didn't just take you to city in New Zealand that you hadn't been to before and flew over the sea a few times"
And this point a portion of the class thought he was just being silly, but I think most of us got his point. Don't believe everything you are told and question things constantly.
The other comment about businesses and money is interesting. I had a lot of exposure to this at high school as I studied economics and accounting, but of course, not everyone does. I guess some basic financial literacy course could be helpful for those who don't study economics. What is interesting was when I then continued to study commerce at university, the more arts focused students would turn their noses up to some degree. "Oooh, yuck, business, how boring". Bah, I'm more interested in people. And computers. Computers and people together - an unholy union! :-)
I learnt a lot about psychology when I studied HR at university but have probably learnt the most about psychology in the best school of all. Life.