4 Reasons Why School Sucks
“I never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
“We don’t need no education…”
So goes the opening line of the 1979 song Another Brick in the Wall by the progressive rock band Pink Floyd.
If you listen closely to the lyrics, you can tell it was an attack on the rigid and outdated nature of schooling.
More than forty years later, not much has changed.
If you were to poll a large group of people, few would say they miss much about their school experience.
Ok, maybe the friends they’ve lost touch with, but certainly not much else.
Why is that?
The answer is because the experience is about as awesome as a week of rain during summer.
Looking back on the best years of your life, it’s unlikely that doing homework and revising for exams would feature in your highlight reel.
So how exactly does school miss the mark?
Below, we take a look at four points:
1. It’s mind-numbingly boring
Do you remember frothing at the mouth with excitement about reading a physics textbook?
Did you have trouble sleeping on a Sunday night because you were so excited about what you would learn the following day?
Were all your teachers so interesting that you never wanted classes to end?
If your answer is ‘yes’ to all three, you’re probably reading this in a secure facility.
School sends pupils to sleep because it prioritises facts over stories and answers over questions. This mistake turns many off learning for life.
Shouldn’t the role of school be to do the opposite?
2. Most of what you learn is useless
Reading, writing, and basic arithmetic aside, there’s almost nothing of practical value you learn at school.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for lessons to focus on practical skills you can use every day?
How about learning how to make better decisions? Or how to manage your finances? Or even the skills you need to start a business?
This is the information children need, not the dates of obscure medieval battles.
3. It prepares you for a world that no longer exists
This one’s a biggie.
The modern school system dates back to the end of the 19th century. Back then, many developed countries made schooling free as well as compulsory.
On the surface, this seems like a great idea as access to knowledge was difficult and expensive.
However, the true motivations were more sinister.
The wealthy industrialists were concerned that government-provided schools would deprive them of cheap labour and so initially opposed the idea.
They need not have worried because the new system worked in their favour - it was designed to prepare students for either factory work or to be soldiers in the army.
Thankfully, the employment prospects for young adult are much more varied and yet the curriculum has barely changed to reflect this.
4. It’s not representative of real life
The school system teaches you that something is either a pass or a fail. This obsession with right and wrong causes two problems.
Firstly, it creates a fear of failure.
In school, you learn the material first and then take the test. In life, the opposite happens.
There’s no textbook you can study in advance, which gives you all the answers. Therefore, making mistakes is the only way of learning anything in the real world.
But school demonises errors, making students reluctant to break out of their comfort zones and learn new things.
Secondly, it promotes black and white thinking.
This binary view of the world doesn’t match reality’s shades of grey. School wants to put everything in the box, but the reality is that life is messy, complex and hard to define.
