Why Education Systems Suck!

The IEB matric results in South Africa was announced this week. Hopefully the public schools will also announce their results this week. One of the things that always happens is that schools and media report on all the top students and how many extinctions they got. School advertise their best students all over social media which is understandably a very prestigious issue every year.

 The question however arises about the other students who did not do that well? Why are they not celebrated in the same sense as they have also made it and now start on the same footing as all the other top students. The second issue is whether schools should actually celebrate any of these students as they have basically excelled in a system that is still stuck in the industrial age where schools were only there to create employees for the industrialized factories and industries. This is extremely clear when you look at school structures where each period is announced by a bell (just like in factories where breaks are announced by ringing a bell). Pupils in most schools have to stand in lines before they are allowed into their classrooms, after which a roll call is done to see if they are present or not. This ties up closely again with the factory scenario where each worker has to clock in and out.

In schools, students gets punished if they fail and expelled if they work together to solve problems. In real life however you learn by making mistakes and the only way to be really successful is by working together. If the school system was correct however, then someone like Elon Musk would have failed and been expelled long ago as his companies Tesla and SpaceX all made major mistakes before they became successful. Education systems teach children for more than 12 years that making mistakes is wrong and that working together is wrong. When these same children enter the real world, most of them struggle to adjust as they have to unlearn all these bad habits, and most of them are not able to do this, and they are labelled as failures by the world we live in.

I read a social media article this weekend from one school and the heading above the best performing students were that they are the 'future leaders' of the country. Now, in some cases this is true and they truly deserve the credit they get for the hard work they put in, but the reality is that as the well known leadership coach John Maxwell states, leadership is a skillset on its own. You can learn and get better at leadership and the fact that you did well in other subject does not mean that you will become a great leader. Most people I know that are in very high ranking leadership positions never did well in school or university, but they became great leaders, and all of this because they worked hard on their leadership skills over the years.

The education systems in South Africa and all over the world are therefore truly outdated systems and should be changed as soon as possible. The futurist Buckminster Fuller in 1982 estimated that up until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century, but by 1945 it was doubling every 25 years. By 1982 however, it was accepted that all the information in the world was doubling every 12-13 months. the scary fact here is that expert now state that in 2021, human knowledge is doubling every 12 hours. Yes, they actually reckon that all the information and knowledge we have in the whole world, double twice a day? Whether information really does double every 12 hours is up for debate however, but I would venture that the fact that it definitely doubles at least every 6 months. 

So what is the logic of the current education system as it keeps children locked up for 12 years in school and there is no way that they can keep up with this massive amount of info that doubles at least every 6 months. How can we truly still justify the current education system.

When I studied civil engineering I had three years of applied mathematics and in this we learnt things like mathematically calculating DNA strands and other biological things. Needless to say, I was atrocious in this subject but once I started my career in civil engineering I never had to use any off this knowledge. The same was true for mathematics. We did three years of this as well and at least 95% of that intense and high level mathematics was never ever required again in the work place, or at least where I worked. It became even worse that as soon as I left university I was given my first construction project to do. I was expected to submit financial profit and loss statements which I had no idea how to do. We were actually never taught to do any of this, as engineering in those days mostly concentrated on technical issues. Another major issue, was that I was a 24 year old child that just finished my degree and in the first week our 65 year old Foreman's wives walked into my office and pleaded that I helped her, as he was abusing her at home. I had no clue what to answer her and how to help her. I was completely out of my depth. I was not trained nor educated how to handle situations like this, but when I mentioned it to my employers, they just brushed it off and told me to suck it up. Many years later when I was CEO of a large private construction company, we were invited to share our knowledge at one of the best universities in South African and I mentioned these issues above. I suggested that the professors and experts add items like social studies and how to handle these personal issues, as well as subjects like leadership, only to be told that students are already bored and skipping classes and if these are added they will never attend classes. I told them that according to me they are not attending classes, firstly because the lecturers are boring and secondly because you are forcing them to learn subjects that they will never use in the industry. If you taught the correct subject you will have endless real life stories to tell and explain how it is relevant in their industry, which should interest them much more than solving an integration problem in mathematics. Needless to say, I was never asked to return the next year.

Why do we keep forcing children to learn things they might never need, or even worse that they can basically just Google on the web. Children today needs an education system that teaches them the basics only. The rest they can Google for themselves. The best example of this is one of my best employees in my business, who's wife wanted him to go and rewrite his matric mathematics paper three years after leaving school. She said that he did not do well enough and although he passed the subject he should strive to better his final mark. My question to him was why? He is excelling in his job and he works with a large amount of figures already. He is excelling in real life and no one really cares whether he betters his matric marks or not. The well known financial educator, Robert Kiyosaki, says that your report card is only for school, and that in real life your bank manager never asks for your school report card. He however asks for your personal balance sheet, which in essence has become your real life report card.

In order for the education system to get inline with the information age, we have to create a system where children's curriculums are changed as their interests change through the years. This is nothing new as AI has already been introduced in some places where the AI system creates a curriculum for each child and continuously tests them and realign their learning experience as their interest changes. Just think how powerful this might be. A child that loves mathematics, by the time he reaches matric, will be on the same level as a Masters or Doctors degree student today. A child who however loves arts and culture might have only the basic mathematical knowledge, but in arts on culture will stand on the same footing that a current Doctoral student is. A science lover, might actually be building rocket ships by the time he is in matric. Basically we will take each child and enhance his capabilities twenty fold during his 12 year school career.

Governments will not change this system as they want to continue creating employees. We have to stand up and be heard. Lets start a new revolution under the #educationmustchange hastag and lets create the real future leaders