Have you ever asked yourself, “Why do I learn?” The answer that today’s education system imposes on us is: I learn in order to quickly gain the maximum amount of knowledge and numerically distinguish myself from the crowd by scoring high marks on my exams so that my employer will be impressed and will hire me at their company so I can make some money and be independent. I believe that the real answer is: I learn in order to become more familiar with this world of mine, to discover within myself what I want to spend the rest of my life doing, to cultivate the talents that I will need in order to follow my passion, and to make sure that I keep learning for the rest of my life as our world evolves.
The truth is that the education model we use today has long expired. What we consider the modern model of education was created about 150 years ago for a world that had a smaller population, lower dependence on advanced knowledge, and different priorities. Back then, the goal was to teach children to read and write so that they could become factory workers, farmers, or sometimes academics—who would go on to learn further if they chose. I define academics as people whose sincere passion is to study, research, and draft reports of their discoveries so that the world can use their knowledge. And these academics went to university. And it was perfect. University was the perfect place for academics, and the rest of the system worked as well.
But today, our world has transformed significantly. Our priorities as humans have changed. However, nothing about the way we teach our children has changed. No matter how much technological bling we add to our classrooms, students still find themselves copying text from a 2-D surface and superficially demonstrating their skills by filling out an exam paper. What’s worse is that most students go to university or college in order to become artists, athletes, businessmen, doctors, engineers, and manual workers. But we just determined that universities are only meant for academics, not for people who want to do practical things in the world. I am not conveying that learning in general is not meant for practical people. I want to let you know that we have had the wrong image of what a university is, all along! Students must learn what is necessary to pursue their dream, but that place may not be university for most people because the purpose of a university is something different.
What our world needs most is a temple of skill-development that may not exist today. We need it badly because this is an emergency. It is an emergency because students feel trapped and frustrated, happiness is not a priority in today’s learning, and education is seen as an industrial process rather than an organic one. So now, please allow me to take you on an entertaining journey.
Lectures…do you secretly feel that they are an unproductive way to learn? Or that in today’s fast-paced and rigid curriculum you can’t truly learn something or remember it once exams are over? Or that you wish school was a bit more satisfying and joyful? Or that you had more to your school memories than just movies, hanging out, and complaining about school?
You are not alone. Many students feels this way subconsciously. No one really talks about it because the education system has grown so big over the centuries that we’ve come to accept its inconveniences just as we accept the very curious matter of death. We just feel powerless…but we fail to notice that it is a human-made system subject to flaws. We fail to notice that students are a big part of it, and that all this (namely our schools) is supposed to be made for us and us only! We are important. Not only that, do you realize how much of an impact the education system has on our world? It determines the quality of engineers, doctors, psychologists, scientists, artists, teachers, and even politicians that we will get in the future. It is that fundamental. Realize that everything starts with education.
There are many problems with today’s teaching and learning methods.
I believe that we educate students inefficiently. Knowledge has grown, but the timeframe in which we teach our children using this inefficient approach has not. I will not state all problems because you have most likely experienced them as a student. Now, I suggest you stop reading, take two minutes to reflect on your personal student experience, and then continue.
I can say from my experience that there exists less actual learning and a lot of institutional torture and policy politics in a student’s daily life. For instance, no person ever becomes truly successful by doing what today’s education system asks you to do: attend class and score high marks on exams. One has to join extra-curricular activities, practice their passion at home, participate in conferences, and take a lot of initiative. Most of the time, successful people—namely Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg—have had to “hack” the education system in order to do what they really wanted. Now as for most of us, doing extra-curriculars and the like for our interests requires an enormous amount of additional energy because we are also trying to juggle our heavy course-load in parallel. This expenditure of energy raises a barrier that prevents a student from pursuing their passion. So, what if these interest-related activities became an integral part of the curriculum? Don’t you think this would lower the energy barrier of a student for being able to do what really matters? This would also make students happier with their life.
It’s okay if you don’t realize the importance of rediscovering learning just yet. It takes time to see a new perspective and it is completely normal. But I believe in you and in the fact that you will eventually be enlightened.
Let us think about how learning happens. Every person has their own learning style, but university only caters to one of them, which is known to be incompatible with most people given that we are a diverse population. There may be more competent students who are failing at the system just because they don’t learn that way and they are not good at playing this game that school has become, with all the standardized testing, impractical format of exams, and the list goes on. Our system has been like this for centuries, which means that we have likely lost many Einsteins in the crowd because the system did not accommodate their style of learning. Therefore, today’s industrial process of learning must not determine the success, self-esteem, and competency of a student as I have observed that this is grossly ineffective.
To conclude, let’s talk about how education fits into the big picture of a human life. All of us are educated from the age of five through the age of 23 and beyond. Once most people hit their thirties, life becomes too regular to be fun. Retirement comes just around the corner, diseases appear, and there comes death. In society, it is widely accepted that one should enjoy life in youth. If the age when a person is educated is the golden time of a person’s life, where learning, development, and enjoyment happens, then why should it be ruined by institutional stress? We want to be happy in the most important part of our lives. And so, we must make a pledge to make sure that our future generations get that happiness by doing something today about the issue at hand.
So what will it take? Just what will it take to rediscover learning?
By now, there exist numerous empowering articles, videos, and discussions all around the world that share points that are very similar to what we just discussed. The problem is, they all repeat the same thing over and over again and no noticeable action has been taken to solve the issue. There are so many great ideas out there, but we should be frustrated that none of them have been turned into action yet. I think that we have discussed enough. We have completed our thinking, reflecting, and drafting phase. Now it is time to act, act right now. Because this is an emergency. This is a social justice issue. With every passing second, students are losing hope in life, students are being misguided, students are feeling frustrated from the inside, and students are being suppressed from practicing free learning by this overpowering monster that has become of an education system that used to work 150 years ago. Act now.
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