The School of Everything 2.0 (Part 1)

nerdimite (27)in #steem • 7 years ago (edited)

What's wrong with today's education system?

The current education system is entirely obsolete and unproductive. Every child wishes he could drop out of school when there are millions of those unfortunate kids who couldn't even touch a school in their lifetime. School needs to be a place of learning new things and skills everyday at the will of the student not at the will of the teacher or management of the school. The fact that kids don't get to learn what they want makes it a place of hatred.

When the British empire started to rise they needed more clerks and for that very reason they invented schools which were just a place to train the kids to become clerks so that they can work for the empire's rising clerk demand. But even after nearly a century since the fall of the British Empire, the schools function the same way as it worked previously.

This is a classroom in the early days,

And a classroom today

What's the difference between the two classrooms even after centuries. The internet age started hardly a few decades ago and just look at the astonishing progress made. Everything's development has sky rocketed like anything. Cars, mobiles, houses, construction tech, and all have made so much progress. Then what is the problem with our education system? What is stopping us from developing it further?

The current education system is outstanding actually, it is so efficient that it didn't need a change.......it is great for generating people who can work like robots, doing the same work in the office. It is great for that. But....are we supposed to be treated like robots who do the same repeated task everyday. We, homo sapiens have a great gift, the amazing big brain. But are we using it properly, the answer is no.

The schools are just making us less creative the more time we spend in school. To better understand it, lets go through a thought experiment. Close your eyes, and imagine you are a 16 year old high school kid and you got an idea to do something that you think is cool and awesome. But you can't do it all alone. You need volunteers to do that. First, you ask your classmates who would volunteer. Just think of how many of them would respond to you in a positive way. Most of them would just stick to their phones, chatting and updating the posts. You won't get a very good response from the older kids of the school. Trust me, older students aren't very curious to do something new (I personally experienced it). Now go to the kids of the primary section, like 5th grade students or so. Observe their response. Their response will be incredible. They would fight with each other to volunteer first for this thing. They will be curious to do new things. What happened here? Why are the younger children more curious than the older students? The answer is, the younger kids have spent less time in the school than the seniors. The older kids have lost their creativity and curiosity because they have got so used to doing what their teachers have instructed to do that they have forgot about the fact they were also once creative and curious to learn and do something new in their childhood. Therefore,

T_s ∝ ¹/_C
where,
T_s = Time spent in School
C = Level of Creativity, Curiosity and Intelligence
T_s is inversely proportional to C i.e. more the time you spent in school, lesser the curiosity.

Why does this happen?

Let's study this in a chronological order. When you first start your schooling as a toddler, your curiosity and creativity are at their peaks. Even the curriculum is not very pressurizing. You are free to play and be wild with curiosity. Now, when you come to grade 5 or 6, your curiosity is still pretty good and you will seek to learn new things. But the trend changes suddenly when you are in Grade 9. Homework and work loads starts to build up more and more. You get less time for introspection and using your big brain of yours to do something innovative. Schools instruct us to do only the things that you are told to do and this way you lose track of your curiosity and creativity.

What's the solution?

The only solution I could think off is to create an all new education system from scratch without modifying the existing one. And for that very reason I have come up with The School of Everything 1.0 which could potentially change the way we learn and educate ourselves. I would go into the details of The School of Everything in my next post. But I could give you a clue, this system won't consist of a classroom or an infrastructure to study, it would be something like the game of Nerve in the 2016 movie Nerve. But I can guarantee you that it would be pretty cool and entirely opposite to the common notion of school and education

See you in Part 2

Let me know in the comments what you think about the education system which I would call the "Assembly Line Education System".