Education Makes you Dumb

Is it worth $$$,$$$?

From carriage to cars, bikes to motorbikes, mails to emails, technology has revolutionized our way of life but our classrooms are still in 1947. Our mainstream education is mostly/entirely based on four subjects known as STEM.

When the First industrial revolution in the 19th century was in full swing, they needed people in the factories. People who can follow instructions and don’t mess up commands. More than a century later our education system is still mass-producing robots.

In 1939 an American psychologist Wendell Jhonson conducted a study called Monster Study. In his study, he took 22 orphan kids and divided them into two groups of 11 each.

To one group he would give positive reinforcement, in speech therapy, he would give them compliments, he praised them and rewarded them for having made an effort. The other group, he gave negative reinforcement, he belittled them, made fun of them.

The group which got negative reinforcement not only did not improve on there speech impediments they started developing new speech impediments, some of which lasted there entire life. Many of the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered negative psychological effects and some retained speech problems for the rest of their lives.

Grades have become a major source of Anxiety, a 2002 study by the University of Michigan, reveals that 80% of students base there self-worth on grades, the lower there grades the lower there self-esteem.

Self-esteem isn’t the only thing that suffers, research shows that chasing after perfect grades discourages creativity and reduces academic risk-taking, over time some kids even loose there desire to learn, and their only motivation is to study just enough to pass the next test.

The constant quest for perfect grades can lead to high stress and mental health problems

Art is a field that we don’t teach our kids because we don’t fully understand it, we don’t fully understand creativity.

Art is more than just creativity, it’s about making a mistake and learning from it and making another mistake and then learning from it again until you make it right.

Our education system doesn’t allow our kids to make a mistake, hence they don’t know what creativity is, they don’t know what to be creative in. I vividly remember my math teacher giving me a zero for not solving a differentiation problem according to her method.

Art is an integral part of who we are as human beings. Without art, we would have never found the cave paintings and never learned how our ancestors lived in the stone age.

As Albert Einstien famously said “ Everybody is a genius, But if You judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, It will live Its whole life believing that It’s stupid”

Our educational institutions claim to prepare our students for the future whereas they are stuck in past themself. The past was different, but today we don’t need to create robots, the world has progressed. Now we need people who think progressively, innovatively, critically.

So, what reforms do we need in our education system? I don’t know the exact solution. Maybe I could have helped you to come closer to the answer. But I have told you what our education system doesn’t do, It doesn’t help our kids.

In order to change the education system, it’s going to require a lot of effort from all of us. Our politicians won’t do it. It is up to us.

Do we want to put our kids in a school where they have to suffer the same anxiety of grades as we did or do we want to create an environment where our kids could be creative, progressive, innovative, critical, and free?

I will be looking forward to your response.