When to learn and when to perform!
Adrian Defta
A community leader with 10m+ video views and 30k followers. Business Angel.
I am just furious on our educational system. We are forming our children in a very narrow minded approach to compete against each other. This is one of the most dangerous and poisonous thing we can do. Mainly for three reasons:
1 – In primary/secondary school, or high school, there are more or less 30 people in a class. How relevant is if a child is the first or the last from these 30 children? ZERO relevance!!! Even worse than that – the best child will not find any reason to progress, and the last child the same – it is very hard to compete against the others when you are seen as the last. I am sorry to use words such as first or last, is just to make my point.
Imagine – just imagine – that we replace the current “ranking” system with a system where everyone is encouraged to progress. And the measurement is done just against him/her. Where you were last month and what progresses did you made? What were your targets last week and have you met them? This would be the best way to assess everyone’s progress. If we will have such a system, everyone will be encouraged to make small steps, but constantly. And, when they need to perform (sitting for an exam, for example), everyone should be measured with the same scale. But this is very rare – once per year tops. The rest of the time – just encourage everybody to make constant progresses. And reward them for making progresses!!!
2 – We will eliminate the fear of being wrong. Learning is by itself a process where we do mistakes. This is how we learn. But in educational system we have been taught that mistakes are something very wrong and we are punished for them. Why on earth are we forced to perform each and every day, when the main purpose of the educational system is for us to learn??!!
Imagine – just imagine – that the educational system will encourage us to take chances and try new things, stumble/fail and learn from the process. Imagine we will just have to try new things, make mistakes, analyse them (and our behaviour) and draw some conclusions. Decide future actions not to make the same mistake again. Wouldn’t this be a better way to free everybody’s mind and let them do as many mistakes as possible with only one purpose – to learn from them?!
3 – We destroy the natural collaboration between us. In the current world there is no major task that we can do alone!!! Above all we need to collaborate with the others; we need to be a good team player. But how we do this if we are raised in a ranking system where we compete against each other??!! It is far easy to perform by yourself, be the best and not helping the others. But this will result in individuals good at doing things by themselves, who sucks at working in a team - always blaming the others for the problems of the team.
Imagine – just imagine – a system where we encourage people to work together. Instead of assigning individual homework, let’s split in half individual and half team assignments. This dual approach will encourage everyone both to learn for themselves and to contribute to the team. How easy will be for individuals raised in such a system to work in teams and see the final outcome of the team work more important than any individual??!!
Conclusion:
I just gave you three main reasons why our educational system is deeply wrong. And for fixing this system we don’t need any money. It is just attitude, and a little bit of changing in regulation.
I am not against exams. By all means – when we have to compete against each other take in consideration siting for exams, interviews, etc. But when we need to learn, during an academic year, there is no point of ranking children against each other. Let them learn!!!
Extend this behaviour to companies. There are some preconceptions that derive from this system. Probably the most important – mistakes are deeply wrong. I was talking the other day with the CEO of a multibillion pound company and he told me something very clear: “Adrian, show me a company that doesn’t do any mistakes, and I will show you a company that doesn’t progress”. And this is so true, so simply true. And this holds true for any individual also! So… I would encourage you to ask yourself: “do I need to learn now, or to perform”.
I will leave you with a thought - take chances when you need to learn, and play it safe when you need to perform.
I'll lead you wherever you desire!
8 年And if we want to step forward, do more than debating and get out more of this reading we should initiate some actions for preparing the first stage of change, respective awareness of the matter and launching the approach. We'll have to lobby for this in the system. For the instance we could try to organize a series of workshops on the subject. These will have to show / realize at the "cellular" level, the implementation of the presented theory. After a few recurrence the result will come to show and the subjects will realize the advantage of the approach. Then, ... we should built a plan. If interested, have time to allocate I'm available for a co-operation in the matter. I'm ready to work within my network, the real as well as the virtual one, to get in this other possible interested actors. Nice and fructuous week forward!
I'll lead you wherever you desire!
8 年I appreciate your standpoint as you captured the essence in the matter. A change in educational systems is clearly more than needed, it's already requested because we've already lost a lot of precious time. However maybe money would also be needed to support a change in the educational system's approach, but firstly is to become aware of and then to get the willpower to do this. This is because you cannot simply change the approach of a system only with a few personal actions of some inspired teachers without being supported by a change of the schools' management, upper structures and regulation. Thank you so much for the the reading, Adrian!