If school were a product, I'd ask for a refund

Why we teach in a way that defies reason.

Summary:

1. My personal journey of suffering in the education system

2. What is a sane way to teach someone? (Hint: it’s fairly obvious but we don’t do it…)

3. The public education system started in the industrializing society of the late 19th and early 20th century, teaching basic critical skills for the time: literacy, arithmetic, memorization, discipline

4. It has since expanded to teach extra subjects which are not applicable to the daily lives of average citizens, and continues to focus on memorization which is useless in the digital information age

Why am I writing this? Mainly, because I am a nerd and the education system has robbed me of years of potential enjoyment of learning.

Around high school, I stopped reading for pleasure because I already had enough of it for homework. I also dropped art from my schedule because I could not afford to “waste” my limited time and energy on work not necessary for my STEM college apps. In college, I picked a major that would get me a well-paid job, and proceeded to take the easiest classes possible to complete my requirements. One time, my roommate and I discovered a poetry class which had no homework and met only once a week (jackpot!). I wanted to spend the least possible time studying so I could relax, hang out with friends, party and do normal college things. I was racked with guilt though. Why couldn’t I be less of a slacker? Why was I always trying to get out of learning? Why couldn’t I just study for 10 more hours and get an A?

You might say, “relax, most college kids just want to party and don’t like homework, and that’s normal!” But, trust me, I am and have always been… not that cool.

As proof, here I am writing this article for fun. I am also currently taking anthropology classes because I enjoy doing homework after work. Even as a teenager, I spent so many hours on CIA World Factbook reading country stats, that my parents changed the wifi password so I could focus on my homework. My favorite childhood activity was when the public library would have an annual book giveaway where I could leave with a full shipping box I physically could not pick up. I could go on…

Anyway, I fully expected to enjoy my education and yet I did not. It took me until my late 20s to start reading for fun again and to regain my curiosity about how the world works. And the FOMO came for me with a vengeance. How could I have given up so many opportunities to learn cool things, maybe to pick a different major and career path, to learn about philosophy and psychology and history, to go to guest lectures for fun, and to meet people who wanted to learn and discuss and debate???

Eventually it occurred to me to think about the education system from the perspective of a product manager, my job. In product terms, if the user of your product is struggling, you do not assume the user is doing something wrong. Instead, you assume the product could be improved to better meet the user’s needs. (The customer is always right!)

Maybe I wasn’t the problem. Maybe I was a rightfully unhappy customer.

So here are my thoughts on why education killed my love of learning, and why maybe we should all be rightfully unhappy customers.

Imagine you are teaching your long lost great-grandmother from a remote village to use a phone for the first time. How would you start?

Probably by explaining what a phone can do for her and the very basic knowledge she needs to use it:

1. You can talk to anyone you want, even if they are too far away to hear you (isn’t that crazy?!)

2. Each person has a unique set of buttons you have to press to talk to them

3. It’s important to charge the phone regularly so it keeps working (it’s like feeding the phone!)

Surely, you would never start with explaining circuit boards, silicon, and lithium, even though those are the building blocks of phones.

Yet our public education system does just that — overwhelms students with a flood of details without explaining how they are relevant to their lives.

For example, we spend years learning about cell division, mitochondria, meiosis and mitosis, and DNA replication with little explanation of how these topics are relevant. If we are lucky, there’s a little “applied to real life” paragraph at the end of a chapter, which occasionally gets assigned as extra credit reading.

Here is how we might teach biology if we wanted to raise informed and curious citizens:

1. Let’s learn about the flu! What is it and why does it make us sick?

2. We are made up of tiny units called cells, which make up different body parts. For example your skin, eyes, and muscles are made from very different cells which all do different jobs (can you imagine having a muscle instead of an eyeball?)

3. Sometimes a little germ called a virus gets into our cells and tells them to stop what they are doing and start making copies of the virus. Each copy of the virus finds a new cell to infect and tells it to do the same thing.

4. How do cells know what they are supposed to be doing in the first place? Let’s learn about DNA.

5. How do viruses enter cells? For example, why don’t our feet get infected with the flu? Let’s learn about the cell membrane.

What we do instead:

1. Cells are very important.

2. Memorize all parts of a cell (repeat after me, “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”).

3. Memorize how DNA works (chromosomes, base pairs, nucleotides, RNA).

4. Memorize how cell reproduction works (meiosis, mitosis).

5. Memorize different cell types which work differently (B cells, T cells, etc.)

6. Die of boredom.

7. Take test.

What proportion of the adult population do you think could tell you what a Golgi body does? I, personally, do not know. That is because memorizing the parts of a cell is an exercise in memorization rather than an efficient way to get a student to learn. This information cannot be integrated into our real lived experiences, so it doesn’t stick. This is not a flaw — this is the way our education system is designed.

So what does the education system do and how did it come to be this way?

In the early days of American public education (think single-room rural schoolhouse with one teacher), public schools taught very limited and universally necessary basic skills:

1. Basic literacy and arithmetic — crucial life skills for a basic job or to run a household

2. Memorization — crucial in a pre-digital information age where information was not widely accessible (imagine you are a rural doctor delivering a baby in 1850, you forgot how to use forceps, and your medical school professor is 4 weeks away by horse)

3. Discipline — crucial in a rapidly industrializing economy to show up to your factory shift on time and perform repetitive tasks

Over time and curriculum standardization, public schooling evolved to meet more complex goals. For example, subjects expanded to topics like physics and chemistry to increase industrial economic and military competitiveness. History was broadly adopted to build national unity/identity and help students understand the US’s role in complex geopolitics.

These more abstract topics were still grounded in learning discipline and memorization (memorizing formulas, historical dates, etc). Yet they were much farther from relevance to the daily lives of most students than basic literacy… After all, most people need to know how to read whether or not it’s fun to learn this, but when was the last time you needed the molecular formula for glucose?

Which brings us to today.

Our society has changed, but our educational system has not. We have added more and more subjects which are difficult to relate to the real lives of students. We also don’t try very hard to make them relatable, because we have kept a focus on memorizing information even though we now live in a digital age with information at our fingertips. This generally makes for an unpleasant and ineffective learning experience.

So what should we actually teach instead? (see my thoughts here)

How can we better teach what we already teach today? (also writing about that next)