The 5 Most Important Questions We Need to Ask About Education
Schools are outdated. It’s time for reform.
“Nobody really knows what the world and the job market will look like in 2040, hence nobody knows what to teach young people today. Consequently, it is likely that most of what you currently learn at school will be irrelevant by the time you’re 40.” — Yuval Noah Harari
Make no mistake. The world as we knew it is over.
In a post-COVID-19 reality, we’ll need to rethink the way we work. As a result, we also need a new way to educate and teach our children.
Tim Denning made an excellent point in one of his LinkedIn posts:
The fundamental point to get is that 9–5 jobs are no longer safe-havens. When the economy is melting down and the leaders looking at a birds-eye view of the world are forced to fire people, or be fired themselves, there won’t be time to talk with you and get your perspective necessarily. This is the new reality:
You can be let go at a moment’s notice.
You can be talented and lose your job.
You can be revenue-generating and be axed.
You can have been with the company 30 years and be asked to leave.
You can find yourself working for a company that goes bankrupt.
In other words, flexibility is more important than ever before. But when you look at education systems all around the world, you’ll see that they’re as rigid and conservative as they always were.
To equip our kids to face this new reality, we should ask some difficult questions about the way things have always been done.
1. What’s the Goal of Schooling?
In his 2006 TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson, а professor, best-selling author, and speaker, shared his thoughts on public education.
He pointed out that “there were no public systems of education before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.”
The sad reality is that nothing much has changed when it comes to the purpose of education.
Schools still prepare children for the job market and ignore other considerations. They aren’t encouraged to grow as individuals. Instead, they’re being trained to become cogs in the machine.
2. Do Schools Understand the Job Market?
We are all turning a blind eye to an important fact. The job market of the 21st century is nowhere near that of the 19th or even the 20th.
We can easily name at least 10 jobs that didn’t exist 10 years ago, so can you imagine how many new ones might appear over the next 50 years?
“The pace of change is likely to accelerate even further. So people will need to learn all the time and to reinvent themselves repeatedly — even at age 60.” — Yuval Noah Harari
In light of this fact, how could schools teach our children to prepare for jobs they don’t even know will exist? The answer is that they can’t and they won’t.
Our school systems don’t advance flexibility and creativity.
We’re still molding kids to some 19th-century industrialist’s idea of a perfect worker.
We (try to) get them used to monotony and unquestioning obedience. Schools maintain a heavy emphasis on memorization, and they penalize independent thought rather than encouraging it.
Considering the rules that govern life in the 21st century, it’s not surprising that young people struggle so much when they enter the workforce.
3. Which Skills Do Kids Need to Obtain in School?
MasterClass co-founder David Rogier believes that online education is still in its infancy but that down the line, it will be the only kind of education that matters.
He wrote on Medium: “The rate of change has increased so dramatically that we can no longer rely on school to teach us everything we need to know. We have to take learning into our own hands. “
To achieve this kind of self-advancement, it’s essential to ask:
What are the skills that kids (and even college students) should be learning?
- Emotional Coping Skills
The idea that schools could teach effective stress management is at odds with the way things are right now.
School-related stress is at an all-time high. By the time they get to college, many students develop unhealthy habits like pulling all-nighters.
Not only does this endanger our kids’ health, but it also undermines their ability to succeed in the future.
Author and teacher Yuval Noah Harari says:
“My best advice is to focus on personal resilience and emotional intelligence.
Traditionally, life has been divided into two parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first part of your life you built a stable identity and acquired personal and professional skills; in the second part of your life, you relied on your identity and skills to navigate the world, earn a living, and contribute to society. By 2040, this traditional model will become obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves again and again.
If you try to hold on to some stable identity, some stable job, some stable worldview, you will be left behind, and the world will fly by you. So people will need to be extremely resilient and emotionally balanced to sail through this never-ending storm, and to deal with very high level of stress.
The problem is that it is very hard to teach emotional intelligence and resilience. It is not something you can learn by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The current educational model, devised during the 19th century Industrial Revolution, is bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative.”
- Independent Thinking
As things are, creativity and independence don’t tend to get encouraged in schools.
Instead, we teach kids that there is a right and a wrong way to approach every problem. Experimentation won’t lead to good grades, and there’s simply no time for them to mess around with what they’re learning.
To teach kids to succeed, we first need to teach them that it’s okay to fail.
Many teachers have space to improve here, but as long as the current grading system is in place, their options are limited. Schools aren’t designed to encourage independence.
This is where parents come in.
We all know it’s important to teach our kids to make their own decisions. But, considering the relentless pressure of the school system, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of overparenting.
Parenting expert Julie Lythcott-Haims gave a TED Talk in 2016 about the ways parents can encourage independence even when schools don’t.
When our kids are overworked at school, we may be tempted to step in and ’help’ by removing all other responsibilities from their lives.
Instead of doing chores, kids only have to study, study, study. We drive them everywhere by car, we make appointments for them, and we take over all the small and big decisions in their lives.
This is no way to prepare children for adulthood.
As Lythcott-Haims says, one of the most critical skills in the job market is the ability to look around, see what needs to be done, and then hunker down and do it.
They won’t learn how to do that if teachers make all decisions for them at school and we make all the decisions at home.
- Accountability
Accountability is a core part of independence. When we own our mistakes, they stop having control over us, and they no longer hold us back. That means being realistic about ourselves.
Along with making their own decisions, children need to learn how to deal with the consequences of their actions (and inactions).
Again, we should give kids the chance to fail and make mistakes. Instead of doing things for them and striving for perfection, we should let them try, fail, and try again.
Their success at school may plummet — but the tradeoff will be worth it.
We’ve all heard the ridiculous stories about celebrity parents who broke the law to get their kids into top colleges. On a smaller scale, parents do the same kind of thing all around the world. Of course, the easiest way of smoothening their children’s way forward is to pay for everything.
“The quicker the child gets up the parents’ payroll, the more likely they will be happy in life,” says Gary Vaynerchuk, an entrepreneur with a real rags-to-riches story.
In an excellent motivational speech, he says: “I did not succumb to the current thing that everybody thought […] was the right thing, which was: go to the best school you can go to. I understood who I was and I went all-in on my strengths.”
But if they never get to experience real consequences, young people won’t know what their real strengths and weaknesses are.
- Self-Awareness
Growing up, adults would tell me to follow my passion. In retrospect, this was great advice — but not really what I needed to hear as a confused teenager.
Only following a single passion, with no room for flexibility, can make people unhappy in the long run.
Some teens and young adults are lucky enough to know exactly what they want to do in life. In that case, schools should help them learn the necessary skills, broaden their perspective, and strike a work-life balance that will ensure they don’t burn out.
But in many other cases, young people have no idea what they want from life. They have difficulty imagining the future and their role in it.
It takes time and maturity to find one’s passion, and the primary tool in this process is self-awareness.
Helping students become more self-aware isn’t part of the curriculum in most places, but it definitely should be. Fortunately, this is a skill anyone can develop, starting from a reasonably young age.
- Balance
All the experts I quoted here agree on one thing — we should help children do what they love and what they’re good at.
We can’t tell them which jobs will be stable and make them a fortune. But we can give them a wide range of experiences.
As Ken Robinson said, “our task is to educate [students’] whole being, and the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are.”
Our current school systems are built on memorization. But more than ever before, kids have all the information in the world available at their fingertips within seconds.
Schools should be placing more emphasis on teaching students about the way things work and how the world is interconnected. They should also spend more time teaching kids how to tell facts from fabrications — this is a rare and precious skill in today’s world.
But the best way to improve schools is for them to give kids more opportunities. Students should get to improve their skills that fall outside the traditional world of academia.
Many children have a knack for tech, for sports, for art, but they never get a chance to find that out. Additionally, lots of kids are rich in so-called ‘soft skills’ that still get undervalued at school because everything comes down to tests and exam preparations.
All this potential is being wasted when we prioritize a few school subjects over everything else.
4. Is School Even Worth It?
Education systems are outdated. Schools make kids unhappy but don’t prepare them for the real world, and none of us know what the future holds anymore.
So… what should we do now? Should students just drop out of school?
This question doesn’t have an easy answer — it all comes down to why you drop out and what ambitions you want to achieve.
Some of the biggest companies in the world hire people with no college degrees. There’s no end to success stories about millionaires and billionaires who never finished university.
But dropping out in hopes of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates is not going to work. The odds of anyone becoming a billionaire, with or without a degree, are low enough that it shouldn’t be a serious consideration when making these important decisions.
Vaynerchuk — whose net worth is $160 million, a dizzying success for a self-made man — says that too many young entrepreneurs fall for the promise of making billions. They overlook perfectly good opportunities and make risky decisions with no payoff.
So putting aside the dream for a moment — realistically, is leaving college worth it?
Very successful people with no degrees tend to follow one of these two paths:
- Some drop out of college because they have a specific product or business plan that they want to follow and commit to. They know what they want, and they refuse to wait for their diploma to achieve it.
- Others rely on vision and innovation, and they choose to play the long game. They seek out lucrative jobs, build connections, and work around the clock. After a few years of hard-earned experience, they know precisely when and how to venture into their own business.
Both these roads are challenging, and they aren’t for everyone. So before they quit schooling, young people need to understand exactly how much they can trust their own resilience. Having high hopes and not doing anything about it is a recipe for disaster.
So what do you do if your children decide school isn’t for them?
Your job as the parent is to let go of your ego. Having your kids go to top universities is a sign of prestige, but it’s not the only way to live well.
5. What Is Good Advice to Give Your Kids?
As long as our schooling systems don’t start enabling children to venture into what they love (or at least think they love), we will stay on this road we’re on now. There will be millions of unhappy young people who perform mundane jobs they never signed up for in their minds.
The best thing we can do is talk to our kids openly and honestly about it. Let them hear some opposing viewpoints, give them a sense of the wide range of options out there.
If they’re still daunted, you could share the following quote from Yuval Noah Harari:
So don’t trust the adults too much. In the past, it was a safe bet to trust adults, because they knew the word quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the 21st century is going to be quite different. Whatever the adults have learned about economics, politics, relationships may be outdated. Similarly, don’t trust technology too much. You must make technology serve you, instead of you serving it. If you aren’t careful, technology will start dictating your aims and enslaving you to its agenda.
Remember, even when you can’t provide advice, you can still be there for them. Support, trust, and a loving background will help young people build a future — whatever kind of future that will be.
