Influenced by a bunch of random forces over centuries of evolution, school was shaped by educationalists and built to set a standard cognition level.

The standard curriculum suggests that the most important things are already known from studies in history. “What is” – is all that could be and that warns us of the dangers of originality.

It teaches us…

How to redeploy ideas rather than originate them.

How to respect authority rather than question whether they actually know what’s going on.

We are taught everything we “should know” and missed out on a very important skill that may determine the quality of our lives. The skill of self awareness and understanding how to choose the right path that is personally unique.

We want to do well in school because we believe that it is the primary root to doing well in life. A few of us are in love with receiving good grades, we want them because we are understandably interested in one day creating a fulfilling career for ourselves.

We then come across people who have triumphed in school but have flunked life and vice versa. The path that seems to guarantee our success is actually killing our curiosity, creativity, and individuality.

Like many academic areas, there’s a huge disconnect between what’s known and what’s in practice. It’s sluggish transition from operating on a 200- year-old paradigm in a world that needs an entirely different skill set.

This is why some of us have come to the realization that the skills that were valued by employers 200 years ago are no longer valuable to businesses operating in today’s world.

Created during the industrial age, this assembly line system that we call school has indoctrinated us into compliance. With a system in place that has little relevance to what we actually need to prosper, society is prolonging this necessary shift in the system that is absolutely necessary but difficult, if not impossible in this time of great uncertainty.

During this time of economic uncertainty, there’s so much anxiety around the economy, we’re thinking, what is it we should do to make sure we are not unemployed?

Yet therein lies the paradox.

It’s exactly during times of uncertainty when we must be willing to try new things, to be more open, curious and experimental.

In education, although there is timeless information to be learned and new models of learning skills for our generation, they are the exceptions, and the transition has yet to gain enough momentum to educate us in a way that will prepare us for our future.

With social networking connecting us to people all over the world, our ability to focus on ourselves as individuals is slowly deteriorating. Thus, the amount of external influence has progressed and we need to be more self aware and think more independently more than ever before.

These qualities equip us with the ability to connect our knowledge and create creative, original ideas.

We are all different people with different needs, experiences, gifts, and dreams but we have all been taught in a one size fits all curriculum.

If we are able to customize our education like doctors customize prescription medication for the needs of each patient, we can focus more our attention toward uniqueness rather than conformity.

“Everything in life gets easier when you don’t concern yourself with what everybody else is doing.”  

In contrast, we do not start our lives with information processors, mental models, memories, habits, routines, rules to follow or the ability to learn and acquire knowledge.

All of which are design elements for our education that allow us to behave and make quasi intelligent decisions.

School can be a useful channel for all of the above but it can also helps us make new connections that make us better thinkers, understand the way we think as an individual, develop our own unique way of approaching a problem, and allows us to experience and see things through filters or mental models.

These filters are usually developed through understanding the basics of physics, biology, chemistry, math, sociology, psychology, history and economics. The subjects that are in our core curriculum can be used as tools for us to better understand the world we live in. The more tools we have in our toolbox the better able we are to make incrementally better decisions and better understand when to follow and when to reject conventional wisdom.

When we view education as the art of developing an understanding of the world we tend to figure out how to understand more, whereas when viewed as work we tend to figure out how to do less. This could explain why we are more concerned with what material will be on the exam rather than what material will be valuable for situations we have encountered in our past or might encounter in our future.

“The purpose of adult education is to help them to learn, not to teach them all you know and thus stopping them from learning.”

– Carl R. Rogers