Leave Your Inner School: 3 Things to Unlearn from What School has Taught Us.
This article is inspired by a couple of resources referenced down below~
In many ways, education in our early years builds up who we are later on. How we learn at a young age may not only determine our thoughts on education but also our motivation to educate ourselves.
Education at school, from primary and secondary school to whatever comes after, has failed us in many ways. Don’t get me wrong, as a student who’s spent almost half of my entire life at school, I’ve acquired so much from school and from numerous respectable teachers and peers. I’m really thankful for that.
Yet. The approach most schools, especially private schools in Taiwan, take toward students isn’t the most ideal. These approaches help fabricate a wrongful image of how the outside world works. In a way, school is a finite game, with rules that only apply to institutions but not life. Here are some examples of harmful habits people develop during their time in school.
Driving on Autopilot
Many believe that one of the best things about school is its function to take care of students and let them grow. As rewarding as it could potentially be, this notion of taking care of students and their learning paths can be detrimental. Instead of having free will to choose what to learn and how to use their free time, students are forced to follow the designed curriculum that only updates every once in a blue moon. It becomes a habitual thing for students to have others determine what they should be learning, studying, or doing for a large chunk of their waking hours.
Many call this concept “letting others take charge of your life”. But it’s bigger than that. If you don’t grasp the steering wheel on the car that is your life, it’s not just other people who’d take your place. It may be luck, fate, the indefiniteness of the universe, or whatever you call it. Without the effort to orient yourself in a good position to embrace great opportunities, the factors, mindsets, and stupidity of society take charge.
Getting accustomed to taking a passive approach in school leads to passive thinking, learning, and doing.
Passive thinking simply means is a lack of self-awareness. It means not self-reflecting and realizing the importance of critical thinking, being skeptical about the preconceived notions in this world, and not thinking in terms of yourself in terms of satisfying others. It also entails not having the freedom and flexibility to design your own lifestyle.
Passive learning is a result of passive thinking that urges people to follow whatever is ahead, which would ultimately lead students to a rabbit hole where they kind of know a little about every field, but none are experts in any particular niche. And well, I don’t think we need to stress the idea that school never really teaches the important stuff.
Passive doing means basically doing nothing meaningful. It conveys the tendency of doing what is required and nothing more. That’s why people say that school teaches students to become employees and not employers. Doing nothing more than what is expected means that you spend no extra time on self-growth, doing projects you love, exploring your interests, and more.
A timeless piece of advice from Paul Graham for students is to treat school as a day job, give it the amount of minimum attention you believe it is worth, and then learn from doing projects during the time you have left.
Following rules and hacking them
When you look at any industries present in the world, dozens and dozens of rules exist. The reason why there is such an abundance of rules in society today is that people set them up to make society more organized and efficient. We invented currency and forms of measurement so that there’s a centralized method in trade and other business activities. We created traffic signs so that commute is more efficient and safe. We created how the education system should be to ensure effective learning for students.
Yet unlike how rules in business, technology, or healthcare had evolved in the last several centuries. Rules in education remained somewhat the same. Two rules that students are expected to follow are unfortunately affecting how students perceive the world for the worse. Students are thus indoctrinated with ideas that may not fit their best interests.
Listening to authority figures
At a young age, we are trained to listen to people of authority. In fact, it’s actually something embedded in human nature. As mentioned in the award-winning Best Seller, The Psychology of Money, as humans,
“We need to believe that we live in a predictable world so we turn to authoritative people that can satisfy that need.”
School provides that. It offers us a predictable environment to live in before we reach adulthood. However, this design backfires.
What teachers, coaches, principals, and sometimes parents do is roll down a red carpet in front of you so that you follow the path they set for you. Not only do these instructions and expectations shape your thoughts and actions, but you also start getting used to having someone to lean on, some advice to follow, and some rules that you’d abide by to succeed.
This notions rips your ability to think independently away from you, preventing you from doing things that are in your best interest, acting in a way that helps you learn the best, and developing a routine that would increase your physical and social wellbeing. Without the ability to think critically not just in academic realms, but about your ways of learning, social circles, daily activities, and even career planning, you get comfortable listening to people who you believe can lead you to a path of certainty. At this point, I assume you know where I’m going with.
Passive living.
Striving for good grades
First, a disclaimer, good grades are great, I strive for good grades all the time. The problem is not that you shouldn’t try to ace the test. The problem is the habit of prioritizing the act of acing tests over actual learning. Again, this is a vicious cycle people often get stuck with.
In the current education system in the world, students are trained to become test-takers who are really good at copy-past-delete (copying the knowledge on a textbook, pasting them when answering test questions, and deleting the knowledge right after) and not learning the content and the “so what”, the “how can I apply this” part.
People who have good grades tend to become arrogant in their abilities that they become satisfied with what they are doing. They play the game of tests when there is a game for them to play. They don’t learn, they don’t apply, and they don’t seek self-development (be it soft skills or hard skills) they may get the illusion that what they are doing is more than enough. On the flip side, people who are less good at achieving good grades tend to either pursue other interests, which is great but fewer people do this, or become doubtful of their potential. Either way, students get an inaccurate metric of how successful they might be.
Comparing yourself to others
Living in a limited environment, and interacting with a limited amount of people gives students an erroneous lens of how the world works. Especially in high school where the way to survive is to become friends with the cool kids, students may tend to imitate what the cool kids are doing to fit in.
This usually leads down two roads. First, a harmful or detrimental path where students form unhealthy habits that adults always warn teenagers not to get into. You know what I’m talking about, drugs, alcoholism, and more.
Yet the second one is more subtle and therefore more dangerous in a lot of ways. The imaginary need for students to imitate what other people are working hard upon. This could be the pressure to study hard for good grades, join a consulting club, or find a summer internship. We, as humans, are beings that love imitating others, it has been wired into us from long ago. However in this day and age, as soon as we get into the rabbit hole of comparing ourselves to another, it limits our potential and sets us up on a path of self-doubt, and diminishes our self-awareness.
It also creates this lack of diverse ideas, opinions, and interests limiting the opportunity for innovation around us. Steve Jobs once said,
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things — they push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
If the people who propel the world are the misfits, the weirdos in school. Why are we sustaining an environment that glorifies the people who go with the trend? Or is it because it is something we cannot change with the education system?
Conclusion
So what now? What if you’ve already formed some of the many bad habits school teaches you. If I had a one-all-for-all solution, I’d probably drop out of college right now and start a business teaching people how to learn the right way. (Well, Ben Nelson, founder of Minerva University is certainly attempting to do that. Would it work who knows?) Yet what I know are some exercises that may help you gain a wider and deeper understanding of how the world works, and how to leverage that.
- Talk more. Simply try your best to get to know smart and resourceful people from all sorts of backgrounds. Spending time with them influences your day-to-day actions to match their goals and aspirations. Moreover, you learn so much by asking people about their Why, How, and What. These meaningful conversations tend to spark insights from both sides. Try to act on them!
- Read more. Ok, it doesn’t have to be reading per se, any form of absorbing useful content works. Books, videos, podcasts, newsletter. Make it a habit to absorb knowledge in order to get to know thyself, the people around you, and the world you’re in. As to what type of content, I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Simply start with anything that interests you.
- Do more. Do side projects that interest you, that may solve some problems that you face day to day. Take charge of this project, because when you take charge of something, you take control of the steering wheel, and you learn how to become proactive. It can be anything from planning a trip to shoot some photos of beautiful scenery, creating an app that helps college students find cheaper food, or even just learning a new skill by yourself. You’d be surprised how amazing the sense of accomplishment feels.
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