General thoughts on education
Something I have noticed a lot nowadays is how it’s becoming normal for people to think they don’t need an education. Or, people saying it’s better to go to trade school than going to a university.
This is bad. Not trade school, that’s fine IMO if you know that’s what you’re good at and want to do. It’s all circumstantial, but if your intent is to just make a lot of money, then this is what is bad.
At this current moment, inherently/systemically what has happened is that our educational institutions are underfunded in the case of pre K-12, and ridiculously expensive at a university level. I’m not going to talk about money, but it is important to note that money has influenced people’s perceptions on their need for an education.
Is it true that our curriculums need a modern update? Absolutely, and we should listen to the studies about what does and doesn’t actually work. Is it true that our education system doesn’t always directly pave the way for people to be working in fields they’ve studied in? Sure. Is it true you could learn everything you need to know from the internet instead of taking out a lot of student loans? Yeah, it is true.
But the main reason this line of thinking has outraged me recently is that it comes from a place of cynicism and not actually trying to solve a problem. It’s an unwillingness to look inwards and accept that maybe we didn’t make the best use of our education, and take advantage of the biding time in our lives where all we had to do was figure out what peaked our interest.
Think about your adulthood. We work during the week and focus on doing one thing well (or more) for a major part of the day. You have to really carve out time in your schedule to study. And when you do finally get a chance to study, it’s like a reprieve from the rest of your day. Last Wednesday was really busy for me and I was mentally exhausted and really frustrated. I had a 30-minute drum lesson at 7:30 PM, and for that lesson and about 30 minutes to an hour afterwards, I completely forgot about all of my problems and felt so much better.
School provides that to us. It allows us to be ok with feeling bad at something and reminds us that we have so much room to grow. And that process of learning, once you love it, is one of the best feelings.
If we opt to grow up and work, and pass on our education, that is fine if it’s your choice. But if we are making it intentionally difficult for people to like learning, and if we are making it easier for people to choose alternatives to schooling, society is setting itself up for failure. We are ignoring the lessons of those before us who have learned the most efficient ways to solve problems, which can save us time to build off of those ideas instead of having to reinvent the wheel.
Three more thoughts and I’ll get back to work:
1) This is kind of like the anti-vax movement. Where everyone before us understood the purpose of why something existed and would’ve killed to be in our place, and then all of a sudden its importance is being questioned.
2) My parents really value education because the alternatives in a third-world country were not like the alternatives in the U.S.
3) Even in the workforce, people aren’t always given the opportunity to move up unless they get more education. So depending on your occupation, you have a ceiling. You can get lots of experience, or you can put in 2 years of studying and move up faster.