Today's education is horribly ineffective

Just a quick note: I’ll be talking about my perception of education in Spain, which is where I live (English is my 4th language so please let me know if I make any grammatical mistakes). I don't know what school is like in other countries so you may not agree with me. Likewise, and I think it's silly that I have to say this, you ARE allowed to disagree. But any opinion that is not presented respectfully will be ignored.

Fortunately, I’m surrounded by people I consider smart. We can hold conversations on complex topics (which, incidentally, we weren’t taught at school) without any difficulty. And while we’re, if not bad, mediocre students, we noticed that the highest marks are often achieved by, to put it bluntly, complete idiots. I don’t know if they achieve this by studying nonstop or by cheating. My point is that these are the people that teachers rank as “smarter than the rest”. I'm not saying that intelligent people don't get good grades, don't get me wrong. My point is that our conception of education is somewhat distorted.

What defines high-quality teaching, at least from my point of view, is achieving the highest educational goals, such as training to acquire, for example: cognitive, interpersonal, or linguistic skills; or what I consider very important today: the ability to reason, think critically and know how to manage situations in the future adult life. To be honest I think that's only 15% of what they teach us at best. The remaining percentage seems to me to be “education” imparted inefficiently, which does NOT make us more smart or cultured. Education in this form seems to me to be a waste of time.

I love acquiring knowledge. However, I feel like I've hardly acquired any spending years and years getting up at 6 a.m. to listen to someone who for some reason has enormous authority read slides while my classmates talk about some 67 shit or whatever is trendy now. Instead, I’ve learnt much more either on my own or with my friends. I’ll spare you the details but the list is very long. And guess what? I’ve never forgotten that knowledge. But what we have to learn by heart at school so that we get a high mark in our exams, I forget in less than a month.

The thing is, our teachers overvalue retention capacity above all else. And retention capacity is no more important than comprehension, reasoning, and other skills.

I realised this when I had my first philosophy teacher. With him, the first class wasn't Kant's biography or something like that. The first class was about debating whether there are more wheels or doors in theworld. What? What kind of class is that? (spoiler: it's wheels). Surprisingly, I think it was one of the most productive classes we've had in a long time.

Because it made us think. Really THINK, not memorise definitions. Not memorise processes. Not memorise dates. Just think. Obviously, the lessons became more complex than doors and wheels, in case you were wondering. I hope to see him at the graduation ceremony to thank him with all my heart for teaching students the ability to think in an abstract and efficient way.

But a teacher like that is a miracle. Like… One in a million.

Are our governments even taking education seriously? For now, I want to believe that it’s not some kind of shady plot to shape society and we aren’t living in George Orwell's 1984. I'm not the kind of person who argues about these things without solid evidence. Besides... Spain isn't even the place with the worst education system. Some time ago, I wanted to get a scholarship to study a year of secondary school in the US. My reasons weren’t to see world, socialise, improve my English, or anything like that (totally valid reasons though). My main goal was to compare education in the US with that in Spain first-hand. Unfortunately, it's a very limited scholarship and I ended up on a waiting list that I never got off. I would’ve loved to share my conclusions on this blog. But even though I haven't been able to go and check it out, in general, the situation seems to be similar in many other countries, at least based on what I've heard.

My conclusion is that, at present, rather than an educational centre, it seems to me to be a prison that trains you to be an obedient dog with no useful knowledge for the future. I'm fed up with not having any time for myself and with that being normalised. I’m fed up with learning pointless stuff. I'm fed up with having to ask permission in class even to drink water. I'm tired of having serious mental health issues because of this. But what really gets on my nerves is when people tell me that I won't amount to anything in life because I'm not disciplined enough.

That's why I sometimes consider dropping out of school. But I know that would be a bad idea. My family has no savings and simply wouldn't allow me to do so because they have very high expectations of me. Since they believe I’m someone with a natural talent for learning and understanding things, they think my grades should therefore be top marks. Well. No. It's not that I'm not good enough for school, no, it's that school isn't good enough for me; and I think this is true for many more people than it seems.

Perhaps my opinion will change when teaching becomes actually good. But I don't think this crap can be considered as such.

If you're still reading this, I want to say just one more thing. Your grades aren't everything. They're just a number written with a pen on crumpled paper by someone who may be even more ignorant than you are. Because those numbers reflect the self-esteem of many when they shouldn’t account for even a fraction of a person's value as an individual. Studying is fine, of course, but if it starts to affect your health, then I think there’s a very big problem.

Let’s hope that the future generation of teachers will be concerned with helping their students learn. Or, at the very least, that this counterproductive education system will be reformulated.