12. Learning about learning

The thing about school is that its pretty much six years driven by self-improvement.

No matter how you look at it, school is just another institution of society where the main goal of everyone is to improve their own image and status and abilities.

This all fine and all, in fact it's probably a good thing or else we'd just be stuck in a never-changing, never-improving world or mediocre people. But it's the extent to which schools, in particular, revolve around and encourage this idea of making yourself better than everyone else in order to succeed.

The main point of school is to learn. It's not a revelation-it's obvious. But one look at the education system and the inner workings of the individual school tells a slightly different story.

Learning should be a journey of discovery for the individual. What schools and the education system does, though, is create an environment in which the attainment of knowledge and ideas are only sought after to then be rewarded with a number or a prize or certificate or even just a rank and the public acknowledgement that you have achieved 'better' than your peers.

To do well in school is to correctly answer tests, write the perfect essays and  know exactly what the teachers tell you to know and no more and no less. There is hardly any need for personal achievement. At school, you just have to believe that you're better and hence, strive to beat your classmates. Because that's all you really need, isn't it?

You don't need to discover a cure for a disease, or write a novel that will change lives or invent any new machines or basically do anything for anyone else. All that's really asked of you is to know what a group of adults think you should know and cram them into your head with no real substance or belief in it and then sit still for a couple of hours before you just forget everything you learned apart from maybe the newfound tendency to despise reading, researching, holding a pencil, clocks and neatly arranged rows of desks.

But what if that sort of thing doesn't drive us? Learning for the sake of being better than someone else is a pretty thin reason to do, well, anything.

What we need is scrap the competition mindset, care less about comparing kids to each other and start embracing the joy of learning for the sake of learning. It's self-improvement but for the soul. Forget ranks, we don't even need marks. Have feedback, have peer assessment, have self-evaluation. Forget about crushing one person's goals and esteem to simply raise another's.

There's a simple was to do this and there's much more to say but it doesn't seem like anyone's willing to listen just yet.