Why What and How We Teach Needs to Change
Childhood education needs a fundamental rebuild.
The current system’s not just unviable – it’s socially regressive.
It’s demanding far too much, far too early in life. Demanding it at a time when the last thing kids want or need is a pile of academic obligation. When having it does them far more harm than good.
Kids want and need the freedom to explore and connect without the pressure of college admission constantly weighing on them…without having to sneak childhood in between transcript-building activities.
They need free time to hear themselves think. To meet and get to know more new people. To get guidance in the development of social skills and awareness that’ll be vital in ALL areas of life, not just the technical. To be able to focus on regularly practicing those skills and expanding that awareness in organic, real-world situations (not just contrived theoretical scenarios). To be able to realize their strongest talents, and what speaks to them personally. To get bored enough to want to take their own initiative, which, ultimately, is the only way they’ll learn or pursue anything effectively.
Right now, it’s simply understood that the “smart” thing is to prioritize studying and college-friendly extracurriculars over things like unstructured free time, exploration and socializing. Winning comes first – you can have fun later, after you’ve succeeded.
Unfortunately that’s not how life actually works. If you work really hard in school in order to eventually get a high-powered job, that job will likely demand a lot. Chances are you’re not going to have the time, energy or attention leftover from doing that job to be able to have lots of fun. You’re working hard early in life to eventually work harder later in life. It’s a nasty catch-22.
And it’s getting worse. Each passing year sees the obligations of college prep increase, which in turn intensifies the competitive pressure that’s consuming more and more of childhood.
This pressure puts enormous stress on children who’ve not yet had the time or experience to develop the maturity and skills needed to handle it. Over time, this exposure usually ingrains anxiety and depression into the fabric of a child’s personality, fostering chronic feelings of unease and inadequacy that they’ll carry with them for life.
What’s worse, most of what children are paying this horrible price to learn is worthless (if not detrimental) to their growth as human beings. After taking the test or submitting the report they’ve crammed knowledge into their brain for, they’ll likely never use that knowledge again…so it’s quickly forgotten. Or, if they do happen to remember/reference it in a social situation, it usually makes them look awkward, silly or uncool. Either way it’s a terrible cost-benefit.
This is not, despite education’s stated mission, making people better, more enlightened, more aware or more complete human beings. Knowledge only enhances people when it stays with them – when they can actively draw upon it in their lives either for their job, for deeper wisdom or for social connection. This is not what happens with the majority of what’s taught in childhood schooling.
What’s worse still: that unwanted knowledge-cramming does its own social damage. Academic learning is an isolationist, intensely left-brain activity that requires focus on reason, numerical logic and rule-based frameworks (especially in the increasingly-popular STEM subjects). As such it requires the suppression of right-brain activity, which centers around feeling, creativity and socialization. Basically the stuff that defines the soul, underpins civilization and gives life meaning.
Unfortunately, outside of academic and professional circles, left-brain thought tends not only to be unpopular, but punished. It’s considered uptight and boring, is routinely mocked, and more often than not is viscerally-disliked in social situations. This is especially true in dating and the formative parts of romantic relationships.
It makes sense: the last things people want to hear about when trying to have fun or socially connect are those rooted in reason, logic or technical knowledge. More than enough of life is already obligated to that constructive-but-boring stuff as it is. What’s the point of handling those obligations if you can’t get to the passion, creativity and connection that make life exciting, fun…truly worth living?
What’s weirder still is that even in the professional world, where left-brain focus is supposed to win the day, it often goes unrewarded. Many with superior technical and operational knowledge routinely get passed-over for promotion by those with better social presentation and connection skills.
To suppress a child’s ability to regularly indulge in right-brain activities in their formative years is to stunt their social development. They are what allow personality to develop and a sense of self to be built, which in turn are what enable their ability to connect with others. The less right-brain indulgence that’s allowed in childhood, the worse a person becomes at creativity and connection…and the more they’ll become an accumulation of knowledge without personal context. Much like a robot.
Let me be absolutely clear: I am NOT criticizing or condemning left-brain thought, technical knowledge or logic. It goes without saying that they’re all essential to human peace and productivity. Without these things civilization would quickly fail, and the result would be a waking nightmare.
…But technical knowledge can be learned successfully at any point of life. And learned far more easily when done in the right personal context…when a person is truly ready for and wants to learn it. Usually that’s after having had a certain amount of fun and building an adequate social life.
This is absolutely not the case with the learning and development of right-brain-centered creativity, social awareness and interpersonal skills. These have to be learned and cultivated from infancy all the way through young adulthood, as a person is developing and discovering themselves. They have to be internalized as different social situations present themselves. They have to become organically-, authentically-ingrained into someone’s personality and vibe. They need to be focused on and practiced when a child is immersed in organic social access and can easily interact with new people.
Once adulthood hits and jobs are had, this kind of social access diminishes. For many it disappears, with all that’s left being work-social (which is risky) and what they themselves create. Even in the era of meetup and dating apps, if a person isn’t adequately socially-developed they won’t be able to regularly turn this limited access into real connection. Unless they get lucky, this usually means leading an unconnected, lonely life – one with all the costs of adult responsibility but few of its benefits. In fact it happens a lot, and is a big part of our current loneliness epidemic.
In other words, if someone’s right brain hasn’t been adequately developed by the time they reach the adult world, they’re fucked.
So instead of an educational system that emphasizes ruthlessly-competitive individualism and technical knowledge, let’s build one dedicated to creative, social and emotional development.
The first part of this system is simple: give kids more unconstrained, genuinely-free time by forcing less academic obligation on them. The modern approach seems to think that interpersonal development can be scheduled in between transcript-building activities (and sometimes with them)…but that’s not really how it works.
Kids need genuinely-free time…not just scheduled free time. Time to interface with more people for more and varied social interaction. Time to expand and maintain bigger social circles. Time to be with their friends for prolonged periods…to go on random adventures and get lost without it torpedoing their grades (and potentially hurting their futures in the process). Time to explore things on their own. Having scheduled time constraints on any of these hamstrings their experience…and in turn their development.
This even includes time to watch movies and television shows. These have traditionally gotten a bad rap as mind-rotters, but they do provide templates for and insights into human social dynamics and behavior. They are, at least, a social reference point. While they obviously shouldn’t be the focal point of social education, they do provide valid insights into different aspects of human thought, feeling and nature. Screenwriting doesn’t work when it doesn’t resonate with reality.
More importantly, they also present a valuable opportunity to enable a more focused, effective type of learning.
Modern education is overwhelmingly non-consensual. It’s education by force. It forces people to learn material they mostly don’t want to learn in order to get into a (good) college or get a degree. Human nature tends to resist that which is forced upon it. Learning something you don’t want to learn is a frustrating, uncomfortable, sometimes even painful process.
But if a topic of interest comes up in the context of a piece of media that’s interesting or intriguing someone at that moment, and they stop to research that topic at the precise moment they’re captively-interested in it, they’ll learn about it easily. And not just easily, but with greater completeness, retention and long-term recall than if they were simply told to learn it without context. Because in that moment, it’s unforced – they genuinely want to learn it. Not only that, but this has the happy side benefit of allowing the person to learn topics related to it with similar ease and superiority.
Of course, certain technical classes are still necessary. Reading, writing, basic math, basic technology and other universal life skills obviously all need to be learned by everyone.
And of course, classes in all subject matter need to be accessible any time a student wants to learn something specific. If they’re ready to learn something, they need to be able to instantly start learning it (while they’re captively-interested).
But the other mandatory classes should be ones that directly address all practical aspects of social interaction and emotional development. It’s ONLY when these things have been sufficiently developed and internalized that a person should be expected to focus on and develop their professional/technical contributions to society.