Most things in life are not let in educational center

Fact about learning

Schools weren’t build for learning.

There’s going to school, and then there’s learning. Sometimes they overlap. Most of the time, they don’t. There’s a reason.

School wasn’t designed for learning.

What we call “school” emerged during the 19th century, when countries began passing child labor laws. It was around this time that societies developed their modern concepts of childhood, and began expecting much less from little kids.

All of a sudden, there was a big problem. In a capitalist society, nobody knew what to do with a giant population of able-bodied little people who couldn’t work, or do anything productive.

They’d simply let old people die in poor houses.

You couldn’t do that with little kids. Factories would need them later. If nothing else, they had to be kept healthy until they were old enough to start contributing to society. They couldn’t go to work with their parents, because they’d just get in the way. They couldn’t stay home either, because they’d just break stuff and cause trouble.

So we made schools.

Going to school isn’t learning.

Historically, schools weren’t designed to teach anyone anything. They were designed to keep kids under control.

Enter Jeremy Bentham.

It makes perfect sense to build schools like prisons if your main goal isn’t to teach them anything. If all you’re trying to do is keep them out of the way, and out of trouble, it makes sense to build them like prisons.

It makes sense to run them like prisons, too.

This is why teachers often feel more like guards than educators. It’s also why so many schools have “resource officers.” It’s why so many young adults graduate high school knowing almost nothing about the world, except a bunch of outdated facts, and maybe how to calculate the area of a triangle, a skill most of us never use.

It’s why we take tests all the time, and why we’re constantly measured and assessed according to standards. The idea was never to teach us anything, but to produce citizens for a surveillance society.

Is your mind blown? Maybe it’s not.

Maybe you always knew.

You can learn much faster than you think.

The human mind is amazing at learning. We learn things all the time. We’re even learning when we think we’re having fun.

We like solving problems.

We like making and building things.

This is what nature designed us for. Humans evolved to learn and create knowledge. The problem is that for the first 18 or 22 years of our lives, we’re prevented from doing any of this in any substantive way.

It’s because of school.

We evolved the ability to use language and signs to communicate knowledge, but we weren’t designed to spend 8 hours a day crammed into uncomfortable rooms and forced to listen to abstract knowledge. This knowledge isn’t connected to anything in our actual lives.

We’re expected to memorize it.

We’re given tests and ordered to regurgitate it all back.

Most schools spend ten times longer on topics than they need to, and this is why young people lose interest. They learn the subject quickly, but then school makes it abstract and complicated. They slow our minds down, and kill our love for learning with pointless activities.

You probably remember understanding something very well on the first or second day of a curriculum unit.

Two weeks later, you felt lost.

You felt dumber.

We don’t need traditional teachers.

A traditional teacher is someone who shows up and tells a group of people what to do. They hand out worksheets. They grade them. They stand up and give lectures. Maybe they try to lead a “discussion” where they call on the same two or three people all day.

Sometimes they’ll try “groupwork.”

These strategies all fail.

They were meant to.

One educational philosopher named John Dewey found out that the way you teach people isn’t by being a traditional teacher. You don’t send kids to conventional schools where all they do is sit in desks and walk around in single-file lines. Instead, you make a factory.

That’s exactly what John Dewey did. He built learning environments that resembled factories and labs.

He even called them learning factories.

The idea was simple:

You learn by doing.

Factory schools presented knowledge in real-world contexts. You learned about textiles, and then you worked with textiles. You did it in a safe environment, with guides.

A good teacher is someone who shows you how to do something by modeling the process, and then watching you do it. They work with you until you understand the process, and the science behind it.

A good teacher also knows how to break knowledge down into steps and units, so each step builds on the last.

Lev Vygotsky called it scaffolding.

That’s what we need. The world doesn’t need teachers lecturing from textbooks and bad slide presentations.

A teacher is a guide.

We’re doing it all wrong.

Maybe now you get why public schools are failing.

They were designed to.

You can’t run schools like prisons and expect kids to learn anything. It does nothing but turn them against knowledge.

This is why we have a population who thinks they hate knowledge and learning. They didn’t fail school.

School failed them.

The reason we don’t do anything about it is because it would take a massive investment in public education to undo the last two hundred years of bad teaching and punitive schooling. Our politicians kick around education like a political football, but none of them want to undertake the enormous task of redesigning schools. It would be hard.

It would take a long time.

This is also how we’ve wound up with a separate system of private and charter schools, along with private colleges. Teaching the right way takes a pretty large amount of resources, especially if you’re having to fix a school system that’s already broken.

Rich people decided it was easier to start from scratch.

They had the money to do it.

So they did.

So they did.

Doing is the best way to learn anything.

Schools fail because they treat knowledge as an inert body of facts to be memorized and trotted out for tests. They treat students like prisoners, and their main goal is to keep them out of society (and the job economy). This was always a recipe for disaster.

The same thing happens outside of schools, too.

This is why everything from training seminars to corporate retreats are so painful. By and large, they imitate schooling.

They forget the simple fact:

The fastest way to learn anything is to do it.

The truth is, you don’t need traditional education. You still need learning materials and texts. You need knowledge. It helps to have a mentor or guide to break everything down and scaffold it into units. What you don’t need is a “teacher” bossing you around all day. You don’t need a set of complicated strategies or techniques.

This is why platforms like Skillshare and online bootcamps are becoming so popular. It’s why companies are starting to build their own education programs, and why people are starting to teach themselves with YouTube videos and podcasts. We still need certifications and standards. We still need institutions. We just don’t need school. The privatization of learning is going to cause its own problems down the line. If we’re smart, we’ll overhaul public schools and make them better.

The world is waking up to the fact that school stinks. As a teacher, I try to do as little teaching as possible. I don’t lecture. I don’t do groupwork or discussion. I give students projects.

I guide them. That’s it.

If you want to learn something fast, then forget everything you think you know about learning. Humans evolved to learn and share knowledge. We already know how to do it.

It’s supposed to be fun.

So have fun.