Winding up the deadline: why spend 15 years on school and university?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Studying is in full swing: thousands of schoolchildren and students shake the next year at their desks. Terms and loads are different depending on the severity of the regime. The children were soldered for 11 years, after which they, under the threat of the army and their parents, will come to the universities, where they will spend at least another four years.

In 15 years, finally, a person will be released and throw away most of the knowledge over which he suffered all this time. Estimates, which until recently were almost the meaning of life, are devaluing like the ruble amid falling oil prices. And after all this, he himself will send the children first to school, then to the national university. A tribute to tradition, the price of which is 15 years of a child's life.

Ask any adult how often he uses what he was taught in school or university. Let him calculate the logarithm, take the derivative, multiply or divide into a column at least - even these operations cause difficulties for most graduates. But they taught, passed. Where is it all?

Teaching a child to read, write and count is the task of the parents, not the school. Even if it was exclusively the school, the process should not take so long. We are told that studying mathematics develops abstract and logical thinking. If so, the geniuses of the exact sciences should be masters of oratory. After all, the smarter a person is, the more weighty his arguments are and the more listeners and admirers he has. So it’s not far from the parliamentary mandate.

In the real world, the speech of some giants of thought, teaching the same mathematics, sounds incoherent and inexpressive. And the crooks, who did not shine in the sciences, become first-class masters of demagoguery, whose logical chains will confuse the most pumped-up techie.

Why exactly the exact sciences, according to the majority, supposedly develop abstract thinking? But what about music, literature, painting? The artist calculates a lot of parameters in real time: proportions, distances, shadows, pencil pressure, color depth, while not losing sight of the mental drawing. A musician must simultaneously see with his inner eye the chords, notes and pauses, control the pressure on the instrument, synchronize the melody with the text and maintain the style at the same time.

This is the difference between us: you train in gymnastics, and I train in everything.

- Socrates from the movie "Peaceful Warrior"

The same can be said not only about logic and abstract thinking, but also, in principle, about the ability to think. The exact sciences undoubtedly make the bowler hat work. But not only them! There are a lot of problems in life that require analysis and search for solutions that do not relate to either physics or mathematics. You can train in the flexibility of the mind without doing calculations. And at the same time achieve even greater results.

See also: Who goes to school in the morning …

We are not looking for easy ways

Let's say you wanted to learn how to do 100 push-ups. Your friend who knows how to do this gives you advice: “Get up at seven in the morning. Eat more meat and eggs, drink more water. Try to run at least every other day. Buy dumbbells and train for half an hour a day. Visualize push-ups before bed.” With the same success, you can advise the future English translator to first learn Chinese, and the future motorist - to master a motorcycle. This phenomenon is called the halo effect. Nassim Taleb describes it like this:

The halo effect is when people mistakenly believe that someone who is great at skiing will be just as cool to run a pottery or bank department, or that a good chess player calculates all moves in advance in life.

And here is what the writer Alexander Nikonov says about it: “A fool is a functional concept. In other words, you can be smart in one thing and a complete fool in another. Be brave in one and coward in another. At the desk to be at ease, but at the blackboard burn with shame. In the ring to fight like a natural wrestler, and in the club it is awkward to dance like a shameful chicken. No wonder they say - if you want to overcome fear, do what you are afraid of. No workarounds.

If you want to learn something, do it. If you want to draw, draw. Play guitar - play it! Speaking Spanish is up to the task. From this point of view, the vaunted abstract thinking and logic that school mathematics supposedly develops are only suitable for school mathematics. That is, we solve quadratic equations with parameters in order to solve quadratic equations with parameters - no more, no less. Like Porthos, who "fights just because he fights."

Standing at the blackboard will not prepare you for a presentation, solving an algebra problem will not help you calculate an employee's KPI, and a problem about a train leaving from point A to point B will not help much in logistics. School does not prepare us for work, why do we go to it?

Why parents send their child to school

At school we seem to be taught to solve problems that will be at the entrance. It is strange that after that all eleventh graders without exception enroll in preparatory courses. But let's say you entered the university, studied for 4-6 years, went to get a job. No experience? Get out, canalya. At the same time, rare Ukrainians go to work in their specialty. In an amicable way, it would be necessary to stay at the institute with your sciences, continue studying them (or start teaching), as befits a researcher. But we want to go to the office.

As a result, even graduates of computer science departments draw most of their knowledge from outside, starting to work in IT not because of, but in spite of. The only plus they get is the crust of technical universities and self-respect for having gone through this hell.

Almost everything that a school and a university can give - control tests, exams and abstract knowledge, are not applicable in real life (except for those cases when a person goes to science).

“At school / university we are taught how to learn” is a popular nonsense among the people, which serves to justify the years of life spent do not understand what. Our institutes have never undertaken the function of “teaching to learn”. Teach a student to think? May be. Make you learn? Perhaps. To give knowledge? Let's admit. But do not teach to learn. Otherwise, there would be disciplines like "Theory of Learning" or "Applied Logic" in a school or university course.

See also: School - a conveyor belt of biorobots

Houston we have a problem

The school and university, although they are a significant stage in a person's life, perform completely different functions from those stated on the packaging. What can be expected from children downtrodden by the system and impoverished teachers who are regularly dragged out of the district, either forcing them to hold a theater called an "open lesson", then arranging unnecessary sections of knowledge and re-certification of the teaching staff? And how many tears were shed and nerves spoiled because of independent, control, exams, which have nothing to do with real life. Or did your nerves on exams teach you not to be nervous at work?

Our schools and universities not only carry out “leveling” in the interests of children, but also waste human potential. How much more interesting it would be to go to school where problems from the real world would be solved!

For instance:

• Labor - plugging in a new outlet, assembling a table for sale, learning how to weld pipes
• Math - learn to count in your mind the volumes of figures, percentages, change in the store
• Physics - Build an experimental model of a radio-controlled airplane
• Literature - organize the release of the school weekly
• Music - come up with a composition or write a cover of a song of your favorite band
• The right - to come up with a law or petition that would collect> 25,000 signatures
• Drawing - develop a corporate identity for a class

Those who should go to vocational school or college go to universities in droves. As a result, our universities - don’t understand what. On the one hand, they train theorists with a broad outlook, on the other, these theorists forget everything the very next day after receiving their diploma and go to beat the thresholds of companies where people with completely different knowledge and skills are needed. And the companies themselves indulge inertial conservatism, demanding a higher education diploma.

What parents don't want to admit

The education system in our country is a duty with the siphoning of money. You can't go to a university without a certificate. Therefore, parents are faced with a choice - either to fully integrate the child into this system, or to leave him behind, making him an outsider.

The school and the institute are not only secure facilities, where knowledge of dubious freshness is given, fueled with endless tests for the sake of tests, but also a way to get a child out of the house. Throw it into the world - let it cook in a group of random people and play "get a grade" or "don't become an outcast", so long as it doesn't wander around the streets.

As a result, all participants in the process from the Ministry of Education remain involved and receive their rations from the budget. Teachers dragon students, parasites from the district dragon teachers. Children learn to adapt and do things they don't like. Enlightenment comes only at the first interview, where it turns out that no one is interested in their grades. They won't even ask about the specialty. What is the whole circus for then?

See also: Puppet Factory. Confessions of a school teacher