Concepts of the Past: Schooling

Ten years of Experience or One year of Experience ten times?

Some of us have great memories of our schooling. Schools shape a lot of our future and help us become better individuals. As a kid, we I went to one of the better schools in Bangalore. I spent a lot of time there.

Schools are where we learn a lot of unimportant things. It's the place where we spend the first fifteen years of our lives. A convenient place for "Adults" to drop off their children so they can carry on their lives normally.

Schools were introduced as a way to help Industrialists generate skilled labour for their factories. These same roots can be observed even today, with the bells, uniforms and students batched by age rather than calliber.

At the age of 13, Saina Nehwal (Indian Badminton Player) was able to consistently beat much older boys (20 year olds). If she had been studying in school like the rest of us, she could never have achieved as much as she did. I'm sure her school trophy case would have looked great with all the inter school awards. But the Olympic Broze looks a million times better. People who are ahead of the curve and who put in the extra effort to get better should be promoted faster and should be challenged by peers of similar calliber.

Each year, students pass their mandatory exam and are promoted to the next grade where there is hardly any increase in difficulty of the subjects being taught. This means that those who are ahead or behind the bell curve are heavily disadvantaged. Those who are doing very well, are not challenged enough and those who are suffering continue to struggle every year. My neighbour struggled with Math for all his schooling career and continues to struggle to this day. I myself struggled with Kannada and English back in the day.

Schools aim to make as many people as average as possible. But the real world doesn't work that way. People at the extreme end of the bell curve are the ones who generally make the difference. Everyone is really good and interested in some subject, but schools don't encourage this nearly enough. Hence most people end up becoming unemployed engineers. If you judge a frog by it's ability to climb a tree, you are bound to be disappointed.

Earlier students after clearing High school would start working at a factory. A few interested people would go to university to specialized education. It was actually to pick up niche and specialized education for a select section of the society. But now everyone does a degree because it's the new normal.

The default degree is now an undergraduate degree. This means that by the first time people get a taste of the actual world they are well above the age of 21. The ones who go for more degrees end up with no practical experience until 25 or even 30. Several successful people realized this early on and dropped out of their respective colleges. They did go on to achieve great things. (Not all of them obviously, just the ones who were hard working and lucky enough to be seen by Survival Bias today)

When in School, most kids lack purpose. They have no idea what's interesting and what the real world is like. They have no idea what money is like and how important is. They have no idea how people are treated in societies and what skills pay what kind of money.

Most people are just doing more degrees because they don't know what else to do. They continue to burn their parent's cash or get burried in a massive student loan which will take them years to repay. The absolute worst part of this whole situation is that the price of education has been going by around 15% every year for the last twenty years. For no change in syllybus and content that is taught in colleges/schools or change in infrastructure, yet the rates continue to rise.

Without a set purpose in schools, children form pyrimidal hierarchies where the nerds, geeks and outcasts at the bottom get picked on continuously by bullies and not so popular kids to sort of establish their place in this self created purposeless hierarchy. This same sort hierarchy is observed among bickering housewives who live in a similar secluded bubble. This is the default reaction of a isolated system of beings who compete without purpose. See Universe 25.

The entire schooling system is horribly out of date and needs some serious revamping to teach kids how to deal with technology better. Children need to get a taste of recurring income to understand how important that is and how they can use this money. They should be taught about the dangers of social media and how it can destroy careers and even lives. Students at the ends of the bell curve should be encouraged more to excel further and promoted faster. Every person and every kid is really good at something and significantly ahead of the bell curve in at least a few areas and schools should help find that niche.

I had a good time at school back in the day. But I wish I had been pressed more to perform better. Take up harder problems and solve more challenging questions. I'm thankful for some great years and good teachers. But realistically speaking, the system is out of date and needs to be significantly improved to incorporate the changes from the 21th century.