17th December 2021
Why the way we teach kids is broken
Education as we know it has stopped working (if it ever worked at all). Even though this view has become increasingly more common in the past few years, most arguments I've seen don't go deep enough: they stop by saying that our schools are outdated and do not prepare our kids for today's world. While certainly true, this is not the only reason why we are not doing a good job raising our kids.
At one point our society decided to see kids as immature adults that need to be constantly corrected until they cross a threshold of acceptable behavior and become real adults. In practice, this means that we treat them in a harsher way than we do as adults. For example, I was a clumsy kid that used to break a lot of cups and plates. Of course, I got yelled at a lot for this - the usual stuff "why are so clumsy, you have to pay more attention, blablabla". Now I'm a slightly less clumsy adult that breaks slightly fewer cups and plates, most people are genuinely worried about me: no judgment, no (major) complaints. All I hear after I break a glass is “Are you hurt? Here, let me help you clean this up”. This comes across to me as paradoxical, especially because, as an adult, my motor skills are (supposedly) better.
We also have a tendency not to let kids get things wrong by themselves. I once saw a father correct a kid about something as trivial as measuring how many grams of sugar there was in a cup before the kid even tried. Why are we, as adults, so scared of seeing kids fail? Or was it the urge to show me, a passerby, that he was smarter than the kid that was helping me cook? Honestly, I don't know. But our insecurities are hurting our kids more and more. Perhaps it's time to stop thinking of kids as immature adults and start seeing adults as atrophied kids. Too scared to go out and explore the world around us, to defy the labels we've been given by external forces.
We are not only raising another generation of unhappy professionals and human beings, but we are also severely slowing down the speed of our progress as a society. How are we supposed to know what we love if our parents keep trimming our choices? If we are so scared of failure that we won't try anything new? And how are we supposed to create revolutionary businesses if our kids are not actively developing the skills needed to thrive in today's world, like collaborative problem-solving and chaos-embracing?
Things are starting to change, tho - schools like Galileo and Prisma are on the rise. Synthesis and Primer are offering safe spaces for kids to embrace uncertainty. It's an amazing start, but not enough. Synthesis and Primer don't go deep enough. While they do an amazing job at stimulating curiosity, the destructive aspect of traditional education and at-home upbringing are still present.
The situation is even more complicated in third-world countries. Brazil's situation illustrates this pretty well: while good quality traditional education is still bad and not widespread, homeschooling is not allowed by law. If we go by incremental steps, it might take decades to see any meaningful progress here. That's a nice way to assure inequality among countries keeps growing bigger.
And if there were no bureaucratic problems in the way, promoting these changes is not as easy as flipping a switch or signing up for a SaaS free trial. It requires structural changes in the way we think about kids. They are not our property - what if instead of "having a kid" we started thinking about this milestone as "becoming a parent"? This takes time - but it's no reason to defer action for generations to come.