Seth Godin about school.
If you are visiting this blog with a device that does not support this video below, click here to watch it:
What is school for?
What was school used to be for?
School was about teaching obedience.Then it was training people to work in the factory.
How to make people compliant.
We built a system about schools creating interchangeable people.
The normal school: a place for training people to teach in the standard school.
When it's work: you want to do less of it.
When it's art, when it's your passion: you want to do more of it.
8.5 Things that can change the education right:
- Homework during the day, lectures at night.
- Openbook, open note, all the time.
- Access to any course, anywhere, anytime you want to take it.
- Precissed, focussed education instead of 'batched' education.
- No more multiple choice exams. Measuring experience instead of test scores.
- Cooperation instead of isolation.
- Teachers roles transforms into coach
- Life long learning with work happening earlier in life.
.5 Death of the "famous" college
We say to our kids: go and build something interesting, and ask if you need help.
Why wouldn't we want to teach our kids to go do something interesting?
Why wouldn't we want to teach our kids to figure it out?
And still, every day we send kids to school and say:
do not figure it out,
do not ask questions I do not know the answer about,
and better better better better comply,
fit in,
be like your peers,
do what you're told,
because I must process you and everything in my evaluation is based on wheather you comply or not.
2 MYTHS:
Great performance in school leads to hapiness and success.
If that's not true, we should stop telling ourselves it is.
Great parents have kids who produce great performance in school.
If that's not true, we should stop telling ourselves it is.
Are we asking our kids to collect dots, or connecting dots?
You cannot teach connecting dots in a dummies manual.
Grades are an illusion.
Passion and insight are reality.
Persistence in the face of a sceptical authority figure is priceless. And yet we undermine it.
Fitting in is a short time strategy to get you no where. Standing out is a long term strategy that takes guts and produces results.
If you care enough to be willing to be criticized about it, you have done a good days work.
So dare to ask the question: what is school for?
Seth Godin
