The perfectly imperfect education system

I’ve spent 15 years of my life preparing for exams. Some more significant than the other, some with greater attention, some without trying. I grew up learning how to add and subtract, what is morally right, what is my civic duty to a country that has given so much for my independence. I grew up with my teachers telling me how to sit, how to stand, how to write, and why I should use formula X over formula Y even though they lead to the same answer.

I was taught about history from a book authored by a few men. I was taught about entrepreneurship, business, and marketing by professors with outstanding academic achievements and dozens of research papers published. Lecture halls where the front rows were deemed studious and the back rows lazy.

Until, one day I realized that what I learnt contrasts starkly with what is happening in the real world. I realized that, the system that taught me patriotism and unity, were using disunity and racial segregation to stay in power. I realized that, as kids, we were desensitized to subtle racism in school, and we grow up subconsciously believing that is the way of life.

I realized that there are simpler ways to solve a mathematical question, but why were we taught to take the longer route, why were we taught a specific way. I grew up thinking the stories were true, until I realized that history textbooks are just a version and a perspective of the few authors who wrote and published it. My history, my roots, stretches far deeper than the roots of the trees that made those textbooks.

I realized that my lecturers were theory smart but lacked real business experiences to equip me with the necessary knowledge to run a business. I remember sitting at the back rows of the lecture hall, people watching, some were on their phones scrolling through Instagram, playing mobile games, and some were staring into the abyss. That made me wonder, why? Why is it so?

The obvious truth is, the education system was designed in a way that would achieve a specific outcome for a specific group. We are taught to think and behave in a specific way. We are taught to graduate, get a degree and get a job. We are taught that our self-worth is based on our grades. Why were we not taught to manage our finances, how to file our taxes and gain from tax relief. We were taught to save but never about inflation.

The common goal, to keep the masses uneducated and uninformed, to keep them deprived of knowledge and skills, to program and shape their minds to follow orders, to follow the “flow of life”, and to never question the status quo. Society, after all, was made from another person’s idea of life. School is where the cat killed curiosity.

Knowledge liberates while the lack of knowledge gives one an illusion of choice and freewill. To stay in power, keep the people poor and uneducated. To start a revolution, equip the people with books.

Submitted July 21, 2021 at 09:56PM by Revolution_2069 https://ift.tt/2W7RWUJ