Let's Disucss: The Shortcomings of the Educational System

I feel very strongly about this particular issue as education is really one of the most crucial elements in the preservation of functionality and progression in a society. Education allows us to build on what we've already discovered and it has allowed us to reach the point where we are today. However, I think that most modern, industrially-scaled systems that are currently in place suffer from severe points of failure which are not being addressed and this causes me great concern - especially as I am a student myself so I feel this strongly. If we take almost anything, perhaps a car for example, and look at it a hundred years ago, it looks drastically different; unfortunately, this is not the case for education and that should immediately raise a red flag. Some of the most successful individuals are known for being drop outs or not doing great in school. From Einstein to Steve Jobs, they're living (or were, anyway, R.I.P.) proof that modern education is desperately inadequate. I'm currently talking with the organizers of a TEDx event to do a TED talk on this, as I feel really passionate about this issue and I think it needs to receive more recognition. I've broken down the issue into three sub-issues: the wrong content is being taught, the content is being taught the wrong way, and the content is being tested the wrong way.

So firstly, there's plenty to explore in regards to the wrong content being taught. First and foremost, there's a desperate lack of life skills in most curricula. When I say this, I'm particularly referencing the issue of no classes in financial literacy. The most ironic thing, is that financial literacy is probably the most universally applicable lesson you could give to a teenager. When a student develops a career, they may not use math, or historical analysis, but almost 100% of them will eventually need to sort out bureaucratic and/or financial issues, which is very hard to do when you don't know how to do anything. Thousands of people suffer from problems derived from financial illiteracy, yet this issue is disregarded in education.

In addition to that, I think there's a much larger problem with the lack of understanding of the value of soft skills. Most conventional curricula currently teach a very large volume of technical skills and very little on soft skills. Soft skills, however, have proven to be very significant in increasing employability for example, as well as providing numerous other benefits. I recently had lunch with a regional sales head from Google at the Google APAC headquarters in Singapore, and she mentioned to me that she has hired people from drastically different fields like graphic design or dance into sales because of their soft skills; she said google "look[s] for the soft skills". This illustrates my point perfectly: soft skills are just as valuable, if not more so, than technical skills but are not equally taught in schooling systems. There's a significant emphasis on what to think, rather than how to think - I think this is an issue.

Furthermore, think there's a disregard for the need for intrinsic motivation. Early, formative years in education should be spent trying to create intrinsic motivation rather than creating stress on grades. Initiative is usually highly valued, especially from a student, but it is hard to directly create - you can't incentivize initiative, because it defeats the purpose of being pure initiative. Organic initiative is a product of intrinsic motivation, and one can only create very artificial initiative without this inner motivation. The value of technical content & understanding should also me acknowledged, but it is worthless if all motivation is extrinsic as that results in burnout, stress and depression. If students have an established source of intrinsic motivation by the time they reach secondary school, there is a limited need for an excessive workload because students will naturally gravitate toward their favorite subjects and engage in constructive tasks. I'm a great case study of this: I'm lucky enough to have found my intrinsic motivation, and so I've engaged in several tasks & projects outside of school, like learning programming, making a business, and creating my podcast (if you're interested, do check it out! It's on spotify, apple podcasts and most major podcast sharing platforms, and it's titled 'Grey Matter' by Lucas). One's ability to learn a completely new skill entirely online without classes is unprecedented in this decade. I learn programming myself through several online tutorials and resources, all for free.

Moving on, regardless of what content is being taught, most conventional methods are severely inefficient, I would argue. To start, I think there's far too much of an emphasis on memorization & regurgitation of information. This issue is actually derived from the method of testing that is currently in place: the method of testing the content is currently dictating the way the content is taught - I think this is fundamentally incorrect and should be the other way around. It's probably safe to say that students learn the content for an exam, but quickly forget it afterward, which isn't great. In terms of aiming for improvement, I think schools should (try to) pay more attention to students' learning types (kinetic/auditory/visual) because 'one size fits all' doesn't work in education.

Moreover, there's an insufficient application of content taught in class. Conceptual knowledge must be translated into practically applicable knowledge in order for it to be useful. Practical projects allow students to better understand the purpose of the content they're learning, and therefore learn it better. One concept that I found very interesting is called 'service learning', which is an approach that combines community service projects and concepts learnt in lessons. In these projects, students are able to develop links between different subjects and gain soft skills too as they put together these projects, as well as benefiting the local community. One study explored the benefits of University-Industry Linkage (UIL) and showed that it provides great benefits for students in regards to future employment. To better teach conceptual knowledge, a proven method is the protege effect, wherein a student teaches another student, therefore consolidating the information in the teaching student's mind. This should also be utilized to greater effect (although I do recognize that sometimes it can be hard when students lack the maturity to take the exercise seriously and so it isn't as effective).

To add to this, I'd argue that classes are too long for students to be able to concentrate and absorb information during the whole time. Marty Lobdell, a psychology professor with over 40 years of experience did a lecture on how long students can remained focused and actively learning. He referenced a study which found that student can only typically retain new information when doing activities like reading during the first 25-30 minutes. However, most schools have classes that are 45 to maybe 75 minutes long, so during much of the class, students are not able to focus efficiently. This is also assuming that the students are trying to focus in the first place, which (I would say) is not the case for most students - an issue derived from the lack of motivation.

Finally, probably the biggest problem of all, is that the content is being tested the wrong way. Most conventional methods of testing a student's capabilities are some form of an exam. I think exams are incredibly inefficient and are overly prescriptive and subjective to the examiner's mood, especially in more arbitrary subjects. Exams make subjects much more black & white than they really are and I don't they accurately measure one's intellectual capacity. There's an unhealthy amount of stress placed on a small sliver of time. One study found that college students were more vulnerable to a wide range of mental health challenges. Another study looked at the relationship between expectations and student performance in tests and found that "test anxiety experienced by students may adversely affect the ability of testing to measure the students’ comprehension of course material”. Yet another study I found looked at the particularly exam-focused schooling system in China and examined its detriments. The study claimed that this approach “can stifle a student's imagination, creativity, and sense of self, qualities crucial for a child’s ultimate success in and out of the classroom”.

My feeble attempt to provide a solution revolves around the idea that practical application & prolonged expose will always be critical elements to accurately measure one's capabilities. Coursework allows students to work on a project in a given subject for a prolonged amount of time and those with more initiative will likely produce better results. It should be acknowledged that it can be easier for some people to force others to do work for them, therefore making the use of coursework ineffective, but I'd still argue that it's better than traditional exams. In addition, I think work should be examined & marked by more examiners so marking is less subjective to any one/few examiner's opinion(s).

In closing, I honestly feel this issue has been disregarded for too long and things need to change. Especially as technology becomes more efficient and certain technical skills become more and more redundant because machines do the jobs better, it's more important than ever to have an adequate education system. Many jobs that exist today perhaps didn't exist 50 odd years ago, yet the education (largely) hasn't changed. If you appreciate my message, I'd really be grateful if you could spread this message too!