Trash your diploma ~ How School mutes your authenticity ~

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all” ~ Aristotle / Greek philosopher

Nature endows you with uniqueness! A set of talent and personality traits that distinguishes you from the rest of the world. I believe that education role is to leverage what nature gave you best by exploring who you are as a unique being so you can contribute to humanity via your optimal self. My claim is based on the premise that school is a major component of your life that limits your access to enlightenment and drives you off from your true self.

At the age of 22 & my brother and I had the same thought when we’ve entered the job market: “mom lied to us!” why? You might ask. Well... because when we were young, my brother and I wanted to be mavericks, we wanted to reinvent the world in our own way.

So we asked our mom, “Mom! How can we change the world?” she responded “get a college degree!” So that’s what we did, yet the journey was in a word “empty”. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning new things, my favorite past time was reading encyclopedias; But I never got excited at school. I felt it was tedious, irrelevant to real life and it missed imagination, drama, originality, pragmatism, analogies, exploration and freedom! It was a blunt delivery of meaningless words that you needed to mop up and pour in a “test”.

Lately, I stumbled on Sarah, an old acquaintance of mine; she told me she was working in finance so we started chatting in order to catch up. When I asked her “why do you do this job?” she just said in a lethargic voice tone “I don’t know… I work in finance because eee…. I went to business school… I guess” but when I dug deeper and asked her about her childhood, her personality traits, her fears and goals in life she literally lit up and told me “Oh yeah I forgot to tell you Ahmed... I started pottery a year ago and I enjoy it so much! No actually I don’t enjoy it… I Love it!! the preparation, the sound of the machine, the smell of the clay, and that warm sensation in my hand when I mold an object, I feel like I’m creating something that comes from me, like last week, I was working on a coffee mug and I literally forgot to pick up my baby sister from school ... but then again that coffee mug! My god! So beautiful………….!” she went on and on speaking in a passionate monologue for twenty minutes nonstop. 

That day I had an epiphany! There is a double standard in people! See, Sarra isn’t an exception per se but she is the rule. “What’s wrong with Sarra?” you may say; ask yourself this question, how can a person be “someone” at work-time and “someone else” outside of work? She looked and sounded so alive when speaking about pottery but finance didn’t move her a bit... trust me.

To back up what I am saying please have a look at this study done by Gallup on employee engagement:

According to Gallup 90% of the workforce in the MENA region for ex, declare being not engaged to actively disengaged; meaning that 1 out 10 loves his job! 1 out of 10!

It is a ballpark and I know that there might not be a correlation here, but no wonder that Heart attacks significantly increase by 20% in Mondays “morning hours” according to a study published in The European Journal of Epidemiology https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7925507 - If 9 peoples out of 10 hate their jobs you bet they’ll dread returning to work on Monday and sarah belongs to the 9 people sample.

Link: https://www.gallup.com/poll/165269/worldwide-employees-engaged-work.aspx

Why don’t we enjoy our lives and can’t wait for Monday to start over?

I Think I have a clue…

What is wrong with your diploma?

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something” ~ Richard Feynman / Nobel laureate and theoretical physicist

In my quest to speaking to people in order to know them intimately I couldn’t help but notice an obvious pattern. Every person that I discussed with had a rough diamond in him waiting to be molded so authenticity would shine out from it but instead a majority of people miss out who they are and end up thinking they have nothing but a stone inside. Actually, we live in a stone society! Where hidden gems live inside each and every person; yet our system manage to screw us up so badly that we give up believing that we are “average” or my preferred “have nothing special”.

I am convinced that we bathe in culture that lacks authenticity – Here is a Google definition of authentic : “of undisputed origin and not a copy; genuine”

I love that particular sentence in the definition “not a copy”. In schools we teach us to “copy paste” information more often than “create” information. It is a safe spot to a majority of people; in fact it is in my opinion a harmonization by the lowest common denominator; memorization, linearity and logic. But I don’t believe that for example “memorization” is the human being strongest suit, chimps or elephant and of course computers can beat us easily at that game.

What makes human being stand out by far is his imagination! Yet in our current learning system, creativity is treated as a separate section or called the “arts”. In sum, you draw couple of pictures and make some “collages” at the age of 12 and then nobody gives a penny about it…

What is the outcome? we are creating a culture of conformity, “stones”, where authenticity is sold to us, pause and look around you for a second… We admire authentic people! They attract us. Authenticity has become a marketable good! Do you want to know what is the difference between you and these authentic people?  They’ve just figured out at a very young age what were their talents, who they wanted to become and got encouraged to achieve their visions. Furthermore, these authentic people have a solid grip to their subjectivities.

Let me break it down for you: I believe that creativity or “arts” is about nurturing your subjectivity. When you look at an artist painting for example or when you listen to a song you are experiencing a subjective product of the mind, a unique vision. In opposition, when you are looking at a mathematical equation you are looking at a very objective expression of the mind which every person can validate, commonalities. I am not saying that one is better than the other; I am saying that both are necessary to build your optimal self. In our “stone society” we are half educated; objectivity and detachment are considered superior or of “economic value” while your subjectivity is believed to be optional.  Consequently, we grow detached, incapable of neither producing nor appreciating subjectivity.

In this stone society we hold the product of our objectivity i.e. “technology” as the human being ultimate goal. Fair enough! But technological advancement alone cannot grant progress, to illustrate my point I couldn't write it more sharply than will DURANT in his brilliant book ~the lesson of history~ where he says:

”Since we have admitted no substantial change in man's nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends-the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other, the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars. One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral; it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build. How inadequate now seems the proud motto of Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is power"! Sometimes we feel that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed mythology and art rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes.”

Why is the system not working?

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change” ~ Charles Darwin / major contributor of the evolutionary theory

-->  The system is not working because it hasn't evolved.

It’s time for a brief History freshener: in the 18th century The British Empire created schools to produce identical people who mastered three things: arithmetic, writing and reading – these people became the building blocks of a huge human made computer that was necessary to run the enormous administrative machine of the largest empire on earth.

Our actual Schooling system design derives from the British! Believe it or not we are still running our schools in order to create copies of peoples “certified” up to “standards” who are able to reproduce a certain set of information or procedures.

According to me, a diploma is a piece of paper that confirms that a given person responded correctly to a certain “pass” threshold (min 50%) of questions at a given time of his life.

A diploma is certainly not a confirmation for: passion, drive, potential, creativity, emotional intelligence, authenticity, virtues and the list goes on… To put it in other terms, all the qualities that are valued today in the job market are not confirmed by diplomas.

If education was a marketable product, which it is… sadly, I think we will have to conclude that schooling as a service didn’t really evolve since 300 years! The education industry has the poorest R&D core and the least customer responsive mechanism among all industries. In fact, in our actual system, teachers and student i.e. “customers” have no say in the design of the service that is supposed to satisfy them at the end of the day. Instead, the service is crooked but you have to adapt yourself to it anyway no matter how many times you complain about it. As counterintuitive and strange this might sound, the education “industry” is probably the one of the rarest industries where customers have to adapt themselves to the supplier’s preferences.

Nevertheless, parents still push their children in education curriculum on the premise that their academic ability and the name of the college written on that piece of paper will open the doors of success and grant them a happy life. Immensely fallacious! Youngsters today enroll in ridiculously expensive studies, indebting their parents and themselves for years and then come back home to watch TV, because their diplomas have been massively sold to others too and now you need something else to differentiate yourself with.

What is the solution Mr Smarty pants?

“Everything changes and nothing stands still” ~ Heraclitus / Greek philosopher

Last month I went to a restaurant that serves “French cuisine” and for appetizers I ordered “Tartine de fois gras”

here is a picture of what the dish somehow looked like:

Not really appetizing Hein..?! Aside from my complaints and my virulent review on Yelp.com I couldn’t help but wonder what a really good “Tartine de fois gras” looked and tasted like.

Here is one of good review that I have found.

We can confidently say that Dish N°1 and Dish N°2 were made pretty much out of the same ingredients. Yet their attractiveness level is diametrically opposed. That pushed me to ask myself a question, “How can someone manage to ruin “fois gras”?” Turns out, the cook can ruin caviar if he wants to and in the same time he has the power to magnify simple ingredients like common vegetables as in                                                                  “Rataouille” the Disney cartoon!

Now, If ingredients were information, similarly teachers can screw or magnify any subject/dish they want. Here is another way to look at it, have you ever encountered a teacher in your curriculum that made you love a subject…? I bet that most of people will say yes, even though they weren’t attracted into that kind of subject in the first place.

That brings us to the conclusion that, in teaching the “how” matters more than the “what”. A teacher has to become a stimulating conversation partner, has to instill curiosity through dramatization, has to mentor, has to understand before making himself understood, has to adapt himself to each person, has to break down the barrier that stands between the student and his curiosity. Because, as Sugata MITRA, the educational researcher, puts it “If children have interest than education happens”.

You might say that a one to one education will cost a lot of resources and take a lot of time, not particularly! with the event of the technology the classroom can become a place for exchange and deep exploration, passion ignition, character building and enlightenment, leaving the repetitive and tedious task of pushing information into student for software like khan academy, cousera, or Edx and the list is long.

 What will the school of tomorrow look like?

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results ~ Albert Einstein / Nobel laureate and founder of the theory of relativity.

This picture above was made in the year 1901 and it shows how Jean Marc Cote envisioned the future of schooling in the year 2000.

First time I saw this picture, I felt on the floor laughing because It looked so much like the first episode of the matrix movie, when “neo” wanted to learn “kung fu”, so he just uploaded “kung fu” in his mind :)

Funny but let’s imagine for a brief moment that Cote’s vision was right and that this technology already exists. Every person tough, who want to use this machine, would be inevitably confronted to the question: “what do I want to learn?” and if he’s wise enough he would ask himself this question too “why do I want to learn it?”

Pushing bluntly information in you isn't useful per se, because everybody else would do the same. If we all had the same information in our minds, we would still have the conformity problem! We’re not out of the woods.

In addition, a similar entity to the blue machine on the right of the picture already exists, it is the internet but my question is, if there is stuff on internet or Google why do you need to stuff it into your head?! Leave it on the internet – internet has become an extension of our minds!

The decreasing cost of Smartphones and the increasing coverage of GPRS in the world are making information extraordinarily reachable. Still skeptic, here is an experiment you can do this next sunday when you’re hiking with your friends in the middle of nowhere. Ask this simple question:” what is population of Vatican?” give it 5 seconds and you’ll see it. A friend of yours will pop up from his jeans his Smartphone and will settle the deal with Wikipedia.

That is why I am very astonished to see people still considering colleges, schools and teachers as provider or owner of information; in the old times they may have been, but not today. In these particular times, one needs to ask himself these questions: “what to do with all these information? How to make sense of all these data with my set of value, personality traits, sensitivity and my natural talents?”

I STRONGLY BELIEVE that the future of schooling will be all about ~ leveraging your natural talents by exposing you to various subjects in order to create interest and learning in you. All done in a very loose and flexible structure so your optimal self would come to life at its own pace ~

As I wrote in my former post my experience in finding my passion 5 lessons that I’ve learned (that I want to share) Discover who you are don’t invent who you are. The future school will be all about “customized exploration model” As opposed to the actual “standardized instruction model”.

In the meantime, forget about titles, diplomas and well-trodden paths and trust your subjectivity ~ there is a diamond hidden in you that wants to break free…

Thank you for reading me ~ Ahmed