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I think one of the most corrosive lessons learnt from schooling is that accomplishment & success is based on following certain rigidly established guidelines cr
by shalmanese 11y ago
I think one of the most corrosive lessons learnt from schooling is that accomplishment & success is based on following certain rigidly established guidelines created by some shadowy cabal of forces for essentially arbitrary reasons. You are judged by how well you conform to those standards and anything that does or does not happen as a result of your actions is out of your hands.
It's an incredibly efficient way to scale your education system to the masses but it's producing broken people at the end of it who end up believing math is just about following the correct steps, history is about memorizing facts and english is about putting enough words on the page to hit a word count.
Instead, we should be training students to take an outcome focused approach. Define what is the ultimate goal they want to accomplish, establish how to measure their impact towards the goal and suggest previously established strategies that have historically helped but then only evaluate them on whether they successfully achieved their outcome.
Sports is actually a great example of this system working in practice. Your goal is extremely clear, there's clear feedback on your performance and tactics are widely available to learn. Nobody will penalize you in sports if you choose to kick with your left foot when "everyone knows" only right footed kickers succeed in life.
More education should be structured around such a philosophy.
- ashurbanipal 11y agoYou make a great point. Although I think that the line about producing broken people is overwrought. I manage a number of college grads who have achieved a lot under this system and I actually think, as a manager, it is quite helpful to have them "broken in" and follow what may seem like arbitrary rules - oftentimes seemingly arbitrary rules are actually quite rational and it may just take too long to explain to a new employee (which is what our education system is aimed at creating) exactly why a problem should be approached in a certain (again seemingly arbitrary) manner.