School. Formatting you for a robotic life
It took me a while to unlearn; it is still an unfinished business.
Going to school. What a natural thing to do, right? Barely anyone questions why it is that we go to school. Why do we spend so many years of our life at school? Why do we need to learn all these topics? Why this format and this content?
Very likely, your parents sent you to school. You did not decide. You were too young to decide. You followed. It’s only after two decades of working in change management that i realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with the system. Why must you go to school and specifically learn this content and not other content?
I researched. I connected the dots. Eventually, i understood that school is simply a process to format your brain so that you think and act in a specific manner. School is a massive constraint. It programs you for a robotic life. It sets you inside a box. It distances you from who you are and who you could be. It undermines your potential. It actually mostly destroys you. It’s not a creative process. It’s a process that sets boundaries to who you are.
Many will think that what i am saying is bullshit. I am not surprised. School is what many of us know. We have spent so much time there that we cannot imagine that this process was meant to be destructive. Many will not even dare to question what they learn the hard way, through thousands of hours of studying and hundreds of hours of exams. Many still glorify their teachers decades after they left school.
For your well-being, you have to challenge what you hold for true.
You likely have never considered challenging the idea of spending 10 to 20 years of your average 80-year-old life at school. You may not even be aware that you have been holding for true the assumption that you have to go to school. It’s exactly the same as for movies. You assume it is true as you see or hear the same things in movies. A typical example: you die from cancer. You don’t even consider challenging the information you are given and hold for true. You don’t realize it’s an assumption!
The reality is that schools (the People who own the school system) see you as a hard drive that needs to be formatted. And this is doing so much damage. Instead of teaching you healthy fundamentals, school pushes you into a mold filled with cognitive biases, competition, and greed. It pushes you towards things that undermine every one of us.
Let me explain to you what the school wants you to think.
Remember, what you think is what you do.
School format you for a robotic life
One where you are a tiny version of yourself
Money & competition
School seeds this idea very early in your brain: you need to make money to live. It wires your brain into thinking “job” equals “money” equals “living”. Why is that?
It’s simple. Money is the primary constraint of the system. Pause a minute and imagine you don’t need money to live. Imagine you can access all the things you need without money. Then you don’t need a job. Then, you can start doing what you love without fear that you cannot make enough money (or enough money) to support yourself or your family.
If i tell you that you must make money to get the things you need to live, then you will chase it during your whole life (or until you consider you have enough of it). And as the folks who control the system control money, this artificial paper, then you get them wealthier and more powerful. It is a total scam that most of us do not even realize. Just think about this imaginary situation. Through constant repetition, i get you to believe that you need bananas to live. Well, i control the banana plantation. You are sure that you need bananas to live because this is what People around you have told you countless times. It’s also what most of them use. What do you do? You come to me to ask for bananas. I will ask you to pay for that even if i have no property right on the plantation. I don’t know if this practice shocks you. To me, that is shocking. Well, how different is this practice from the current one with money?
What school should teach you?
In its current form, school is not a tool serving those who attend it. It is my opinion that we should challenge this tool. We should even wonder if this tool should be trashed because of its destructive function.
At Peoplelyzer, we talk about a “school of life”. A tool that gives you the foundation that you need to get started. This tool will follow you during your life. It is nonsense that you only learn at the beginning of your life and then don’t learn anything else or learn a few weeks per year.
The tool should
Cover the spiritual aspect of life. We have a near-zero understanding of why we are here on Earth. Narrowing down education to analytical ways of thinking is a very likely limited approach. It may be a wrong approach.
Teach us to work as teams. How do we interact with other individuals, no matter who they are, to reach an outcome? We need to be very good at collaborating. This involves the capability to align with other folks.
Teach us to listen to other human beings. You should be able to listen and understand other People. This will develop empathy across society. It will also stop this constant reactive behavior most People have.
Teach us to observe things around us. Observation is vital to raising People who can understand. It will significantly increase society’s critical thinking level.
Guide and support you. The tool provides you and the people around you with what you need to thrive. It means that the tool should adapt to the users’ desires, needs, and wants.
I don’t think that school should teach you values. I believe that values are discovered and embodied through your interactions with others. If you are taught to listen to others, you will grow empathy as a value. I should not try to teach you empathy but the practice of listening to other People. This is why i did not list “teaching values” in the bullet points above.
Let’s get rid of these practices
These are practices that we should get rid of as they do not serve us:
Individual marks. This practice serves the folks running the system as they want you to compete against one another. There is near zero empathy under this practice. It’s me against others. We want to eliminate individual marks and replace this with constant feedback from other People.
Competition. By removing individual marks, we also eliminate the concept of competition. You do not need to compete against other People or a team. You guys work collaboratively to achieve the outcome you are after.
Memorization of fabricated stories. The school primarily teaches you a story that has been agreed upon. It’s often not the real story, and it’s very often half of the story. Key point: you need to believe this bullshit to support the current rigged monopoly. It’s better not to learn a story than to learn a false story.
Push mechanism. School is mostly pushing information toward you and then getting you to take exams to measure how well your hard drive has been formatted. Well, we need to get rid of this mostly one-way pattern: pushing. Tomorrow’s society is to be operated by the folks who sit at school today, so we should listen to them as much, if not more, than what we tell them to do. We should not tell them what to do. We should guide them and support them.
The current sitting model of individual desks in rows and columns. It’s a mirror of the individualistic society we build. Everyone has pens, books, and tables, precisely like each of us will have our own home, car, and insurance later in life. This is no coincidence. Let’s remodel classrooms as collaborative spaces.
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