The Problem with Education Today
Problem 1: Education ≠ learning
Let’s start from the beginning, what is the point of education. I vaguely think the point is to prepare children for (their, our, your) future. The problem is, our education doesn’t do any of this.
We teach things that are useless in real life. Of course, an argument can be made that these teach us transferrable skills, but then why don’t we teach the real skill itself?
We don’t just teach our kids the important things.
- We don’t teach psychology 🧠, i.e. we don’t teach the real world. Our curriculum is to real life, what classical economics is to behavioural economics. We don’t teach children how generally things work in the real world, but teach them how thinks precisely should work in the world.
- Heuristics of the mind — perhaps the most important thing we should teach people is how our brain sabotages us, and how we should avoid that to think clearly.
Even worse, we teach our kids the wrong things.
- In schools, we spoon-feed people the “right” and “wrong” answer, without teaching them how to find and solve problems.
- We use only one yard stick to measure students, instead of letting kids develop what they’re good at.
- Indeed, (in Hong Kong) we punish creativity, and initiative. Indeed, in local schools, we punish people for being attacked by other students. We inoculate people against innovation, which cannot be the right thing.
- We mistake elite education and memorisation with real learning and understanding.
Problem 2: One size fits all
Our current teaching systems are one size fits all. There is little tailoring of content, attention and testing. We are using an Industrial Age/machine paradigm to churn out kids like bricks. How can we not fail?
Problem 3: Lack of innovation in education
All this, of course, boils down to a lack of innovation in schools. We just adopt past models of schooling, without thinking about — psychology, technology or what the future will look like.
Some must consider research:
- Bloom’s Two-Sigma problem 📈
- Memory hacking, e.g. spaced repetition
- The Pygmalion Effect
For Verdict ⚖️ and disruption possibilities 🚀, see part two
Originally published at https://listed.to.
