Education

Western Education Has Collapsed, and No One Wants to Admit It

Information is abundant, but ambition isn’t.

Since the last 2 weeks, there hasn’t been a day when Medium missed to suggest me one of these stories:

• I don’t want to be a teacher anymore
• Why education is so costly in America
• Teachers are underpaid
• Teachers are quitting because of unruly students

Another, the less frequent headline I observe is a variation of one of the following:

• How smartphones are ruining the childhood/education/future generations
• Why parents fail to discipline children
• Why teachers aren’t empowered enough to handle children
• Is schooling/mainstream education truly worth it?

To the best of my memory, these are real stories as witnessed in the United States or Europe. These developed nations are the founding cornerstones of modern democracy, not just the citadels of high-quality education.

I do not talk about Eastern education, because western models have altered education across the globe. Even the measurements to judge the best belong to them.

The Education Promise was always a faulty one:

Through the efforts of UNESCO, education is a fundamental constitutional right in most countries today. This means that every form of government (democratic, communist, capitalist, or socialist) accepts it as a vital need, at least in theory.

In the modern age, this sole factor bestows education with an aura that seems to belong to angels and saints. Neoliberals often brandish education in the tales of their promised Utopia:

- Education is knowledge, and knowledge is enlightenment! 
- Unless someone talks about building schools, he/she is unvotable.
- 100% literacy is our goal for the next decade! (Didn't they read history? ancients knew how to write 5000 years ago.)

Among the most beautiful lies modern democracies have peddled, the education lie is perhaps the longest-living one.

A couple of centuries ago, colonizer nations’ churches (Britain and its world-conquering European rivals) were wooing parents into schools. Education mostly meant teaching religion. Because of the sheer power churches wielded, education was the coolest fad to gain social acceptability and upward mobility.

During the industrial revolution, the power shifted from churches to factories. Education followed the power trajectory. Instead of churches, it now played in the hands of the factory owners who needed to steal labor from farms. That labor needed to unlearn its ancestry-old vocations just to get modernized. Education made them lose their expertise and financial momentum only to gain vanity, with an empty promise of upward mobility past 2-3 generations, if at all.

In colonies, the ugliness had an even more beautiful mask. Education meant preparing subordinate clerks who will uphold the power of the colonizers and crush their kinsfolk at a single firing order.

Past the two world wars, engineering-centric industries required supervisory middlemen to keep communist unions in check. They christened them MBAs and layered them indefinitely to ensure the dollar rarely trickled down.

Yes, the dollar always remained within the top layers, beckoning anyone upwards who wanted a pie from it.

Only one condition: Moral degradation — the complete opposite of the enlightening education ideal.

The Death of the Educational Ambition:

Most dreamer millennials have performed their ideal career role, either on stage or in isolation. Those roles were limited to white-collar jobs: Doctors, Scientists, Pilots, Chief Engineers, or Presidents. Women weren’t even allowed to dream beyond becoming nurses, air hostesses, schoolteachers, or (best-) medical doctors.

In the internet decades, the dreams being planted went bold, at the expense of specificity. Societal educational ambitions abandoned boilerplate boundaries and began to root for real passions.

In elite societies, most career discussions have been going on like this:

A child psychiatrist? An algae researcher? 

You know what? Enroll in one of those hobby groups. We would totally love to see you do something outstanding!

You gotta pick a mainstream degree, though. Tech is the best! Science is the 2nd best.

Art isn't bad either. Those drawings sell for millions. 

(wow! what a piece of actionable advice!)

If someone had it better, it was an exception, and mostly through solo effort. As a rule, society, through parental pressure, played an intensely critical role in forming one’s ambition around education.

Today, the educational dream has totally gone berserk. It’s a wild wild west, thanks mostly to the internet which is a million miles ahead. And more due to educational systems falling behind.

Information overload and hapless parents have led us to the most terrible outcome: The only feasible dream today’s kids have, where they are able to envision an end from the beginning, is this:

Become the most popular TikToker / YouTuber / Instagrammer

This is better for them in the short run. But very wrong for society in the long run.

In the next two sections, I will try to prove my above point with the help of art and science as examples.

Science education has no science, only corporate speak:

I have witnessed a dozen post-grads being unable to find a Ph. D. course simply because they couldn’t write a picture-perfect motivation letter, or check an invisible box out of 1024 labyrinthian archaic university systems.

Science is standing atop education, not corporate money. But how much education has benefitted from science or corporate money? Where does science education stand?

I am not talking about the most viral science app that would thrive on a billion in government funding, and claim to make an Einstein out of a 6-year-old with a 10-year subscription.

I am asking how many students find the motivation to build stuff, instead of stupidly consuming the dumbed-down socialized version of popularized science (you can replace any subject here). When such students are found, why aren’t scientific citadels chasing them? Why are students with scientific aptitude required to have a certain drive, a positive aura, a gleaming personality — something akin to corporate white suits who are better at pleasing their paymasters? Why aren’t laboratories and universities ready to shape up their career trajectories before they are discouraged and driven out of the system?

Because by design, science is made to serve the power holders, not education and humanity.

Some recap: Scientists began their glory days in the renaissance, and attained celebrity status while the world was at war (later 19th to half of the 20th century). Allied scientists and mathematicians crushed German ships. Einstein’s energy equation pacified Japan forever. The entire tech revolution of today stands atop the military-industrial research (computers, chips, GPS, internet) during and past war times.

But soon after WW-II, scientists began to fade away behind their sponsoring corporation curtains.

Now, close your eyes for the two bullets below:

• Unless you are a science (under-)graduate or a diehard science enthusiast, how many scientists’ names you can remember beyond Newton, Edison, and Einstein? You only have 5 seconds. Append Stefen Hawking. Add Marie Curie. Add also your countryman who is lucky to be in your memory because he/she won the Nobel only 3 days ago. Any more?
• Repeat the same exercise with billionaires and celebrities.

No prizes for guessing which bullet wins.

Today, if you want to raise a scientist kid, what exactly do you do?

• You make him read the biography of a century-old icon.
• If you think that’s too old, get him an EdTech company’s monthly science kit subscription. There, he can play with Arduinos, build Drones and upload geeky-looking selfies on his favorite social platform.

None of those 2 bullets is my favorite, after having tried each of them. At best, they create a memory, a milestone in my parent-child relationship.

But why should one try to raise a scientist kid? Wouldn’t they naturally follow their destinies, if they are made for it?

No, they won’t. A career in science is no joke (even minus the money part). The environment has a bigger part to play; currently, it is filled with advertisements. Even if your kid is watching the most advanced science YouTube video every day, it is still one or the other kind of advertisement. There is no application of formulas and principles, only consumption.

No one becomes a scientist following that natural path.

I know, because I am a parent.

Art education leads to darker alleys

The starting point for art is always YouTube, Tiktok, or Instagram. The medium takes over before a curious kid knows about it. And platforms aren’t art. They are all advertisements.

Those platforms do a nice job arousing interest (something highly overrated in millennials' times), but past that point, there is a gaping void.

• What would continually make them apply what they grasped?
• Who would tell them the difference between tools + techniques vs ideas and themes?
• Who would encourage them in despair? Who would challenge them to beat their own self when they feel they are on Everest?

None of today’s self-learning paths (even highly paid ones) teach how to think and be self-motivated enough to think. They fail to demand persistence — a quality even the majority of the millennials lack, past web intrusion. One can’t really fault Gen X and Gen Z.

The rest of the damage is done by juvenile greed and naïveté. The 0.1% outlier hackers turn to the dark side. Then you get Web3, which promises 10000 Ether tokens if your next NFT goes viral.

The rest 99.9% would choose mediocrity for life. Why? Because they aren’t ready to spend the famous 10000 hours after Ivy league portfolio prep.

What? Reading books? Is that even popular?

The success stories aren’t western:

Nordic countries (the West likes to call them communists because the modern socialist ideals have their roots in the communist USSR) have consistently outperformed the world in basic education, by the very own standards of the west.

Lately, China and Singapore have also replicated their models to get ahead in PISA rankings (an international assessment that includes reading, math, and language testing at the post-primary education level).

What is their key to success?

• Central curriculum, with infinite autonomy for teachers
• High stress on the quality of teachers in government-funded schools (which are abundant in number)
• Stress on application (for science), reading, and outdoors (for overall development)
• Zero or little interference from corporate profiteering — neither from textbook publishers nor from modern-day Edtech glitter.
• Society centered on work-life balance. Nordics have unemployment benefits and government healthcare — the biggest economic cushions against poverty. As a result, teachers are free from what if sort of thinking and hold their ground with courage when it counts. Needless to say, they pass on the same value to students.

The question is, how many corporate-controlled governments want to replicate these models? Who wants to dedicate his vast field to reap the crop with a long-term yield horizon? Apparently, no one.

The Perfect Portfolio:

I am still working 9–5. So I need a year OFF to figure out my teenage son’s career.

My problem: How do I shape my child’s career?

Short answer: By implanting a dream.

Long answer: Through carefully curated knowledge path for him/her to discover

My conclusion: I am lost in the ocean of information. But my bigger fear is that my kid would divert himself into a bog of media, which is filled with shortcuts and mediocrity and thrives on statistical prowess.

When I show him a YT video about Thomas Edison, he gets intensely inspired by his baggage car experiment. Where would this lead him today? Will a Chemistry college reward him for blasting his bicycle with yet uninvented formula, and sponsor him to develop the truly long-lasting light bulb?

(I get it: But Edison had it a lot harder. He wasn’t fully educated within the system. Right. But that’s the point. Isn’t today supposed to be easier? Aren’t today’s systems smarter? In Edison’s time, education wasn’t even structured. Today, with all the glitters of tech, it is. But it is also bulging out of its shape.)

The next day, if he is inspired by Van Gogh’s YouTube, and manages to paint an exact replica in an hour, what next? Will that be enough to get into a barebone arts university, let alone an ivy league one?

This time, let’s find out.

He would need to perform a lot of online research. His school won’t help him with that. Yes, every parent wants to dream about someone announcing to him/her that their chosen one belongs to the world. But that doesn’t always happen in the real world.

Besides, most teachers aren’t good at spotting prodigies. Plus, what’s their motivation? Their salaries across the (even developed) world barely cover babysitting your YT/TikTok-powered new age chiplings.

Even if teachers happen to spot prodigies, the systems aren’t in place to advance their recommendations. How weighty is a teacher’s voice in the system? Not even enough for himself/herself.

Having concluded your prodigy is on his own, let’s move forward to legalities.

Admissions were difficult without the internet, yes. But then, the odds of success were high, because the mere discovery of an institute attested to the hunger for learning. Less competition + passion proven by application = Easier admission.

Today, due to the online admission model, elite universities bathe in truckloads of applications. They mitigate this situation by hiring a dozen application-sifting associates. The promise of scooping the best from across the world remains even more unfulfilled. But who is ready to acknowledge it? Trashed applications have no legs of their own.

If your unfortunate prodigy belongs to a developing country, he needs yet one more Godfather: An education agent: A legalized immigration shop attested by ivy league universities themselves.

But they are cross-border, so there is no scam going on here, dude. But good try, sniffer!

The agent will assist him to check all the boxes, charging two-semester worth (again, in an offshore bank, smoke without fire, sorry ☹️). With that package offer, the agent will hold null accountability. The onus of success would still lie in the portfolio. If it fails, the admission clerk will not pass your prodigy’s submission to the art teacher.

If we would be lucky, we will get a personalized rejection slip, instead of a boilerplate response:

The seats and the professor’s time are limited. (This institute is elite, remember?)

Western Education is collapsing, and no one wants to admit it:

Parents want to admit it, but they can’t put their finger on the real problem. Capitalism has made some of them work 9–9, and quarrel for the rest of the night. If they are lucky, they can unwind during the weekend with the kids. Sorry, no uplifting activities destined for the future. Only recess — escapist entertainment. This part is so scary that I don’t want to venture to go into it. I have to touch on our screwed work-life balance; I have to tackle gender roles in parenting; I have to discuss workplace exploitation and gender discrimination. It involves looking back to the point where we allowed our priorities to be shaped by unsustainable capitalism. It didn’t promise anything but sold us a dream, and that dream is turning into all of us looking into an endless abyss.

Kids perhaps won’t admit it, because very rare ones identify what kind of hell they are living in (though they are clearer about the hell part). Anyway, they got no votes, no tax money, and often, no words to voice their unrequited competence. They don’t read much anymore, and this symptom is also lately visible in the countries leading modern Education. Some of them sometimes display sparks of imagination, and they drop them on social media. There, the undeserving ones confuse merit with noticeability, and the deserving ones confuse the lack of the latter with the lack of the former. I don’t know which option is the more regrettable of those two.

Teachers want to admit it, for sure. But they are already trapped in the beastly system. Their best escape is a private coaching platform or a website, which could be a glittering Ponzi scheme. Or once again, an ad-funded YT channel. Those who aren’t fit to influence are past their prime.

And they can’t quiet-quit. The system might allow it, but the unruly and vulnerable kids won’t.