“The best way to predict your future is to create it”
Abraham Lincoln
A couple of years ago, I was listening to the “America’s cheapest family”, the Economides family, and realized that I have already made mistakes with my daughter. The father asked whether we all wanted to raise responsible adults or perpetual children. The two Economides parents advised that even if the parents were financially comfortable, they should not allow the children to buy and live at the parents’ spending level, because by doing so the children would be “locked” into a likely unsustainable lifestyle. It is quite possible that the children would not have the income that the parents make. Of course, this does not mean that the children would be less happy than the “richer” parents. After all, the millionaires and billionaires are not much happier than the average American. However, if the children have lower income and yet, spend at the level of the rich parents, happiness is unlikely.
This trajectory of thoughts brought more questions about the future. Would our children have any job stability? It has been predicted that in the future, there might be only temporary job contracts; people would rarely stop to live in one place, since they will be in pursuit of their next job/contract. Would the informational technology and automation continue to evolve and what would the consequences be… As we exhaust the world’s resources and take unwise decisions to address the world’s problems, would our society recess and shrink back to the mechanical and handmade devices? With all these uncertainties, am I making a mistake by pushing my child into the time-devouring, super-expensive, goal-disorienting, haphazard educational system? By conforming to the prefabricated mold of our educational system and its regulations and artificially-imposed standards, do I suffocate the imagination and creativity of my child?
As I asked myself these questions, and felt more and more upset. I thought that the answers to these questions depended on whether I wanted to see my child become a happy adult or a successful adult. Strangely enough, in our society the most popular definition of success rarely overlaps with the understanding of individual happiness. Success in our world is frequently measured in dollar signs. The schools prepare our children to be successful (i.e., earn money); the schools do not explain to our children how to seek happiness. And we, as dutiful parents, reinforce the lessons from the schools. Have you recently looked at how happiness changes with age? It seems that at age of 15, our children become increasingly unhappy with their lives – the school seems worse than a prison, and all their activities in and out of school are rationed and predetermined.
Peter Gray, a psychology professor wrote, “Children are forced to attend school, where they are stripped of most of their rights,”… “The debate shouldn’t be about whether school is prison, because unless you want to change the definition of prison, it is.” … My daughter cannot go to the school’s bathroom unless she has a permission slip, she can attend school only dressed by THE code. There is also a system of increasing in intensity punishments, if she does not observe the rules.
Masters of imagination such as Hans Christian Andersen and Beatrix Potter shared their true feelings about school. Andersen reminisced that "his years in school were the darkest and most bitter of his life. At one school, he lived at his schoolmaster's home. There he was abused in order to improve his character... He later said the faculty had discouraged him from writing in general, causing him to enter a state of depression”. Beatrix Potter, the author of the whimsical fairy tales about Peter Rabbit, admitted “Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality.”
Children in the U.S. may spend 17 years in school if they attend college for four years and forgo graduate education. This is overschooling. Learning useful skill should not take this long. Worse, the 17 years do not guarantee any useful job skills – frequently, the young people are catapulted out of college into a spotty work world without any applicable skills. The lucky ones, who do find a job, frequently feel like apprentices and start learning meaningful skills at the job.
As every extreme gives rise to another extreme, the overschooling has given rise to the unschooling - read Hewitt B. We Don't Need No Education, Magazine, September 2014.
“The best way to predict your future is to create it”, said Abraham Lincoln. We should create the future of America by educating and preparing our children for the real world. However, the future is glum, if we rely on the current educational system. The present overschooling prunes the children’s imagination into a shriveled trunk without brunches and flowers, diminishes the future children’s productivity, and tempers with their health. As a result, we squander our greatest potential, our children, and jeopardize their future.
Compare the current overschooling, the lack of responsibility among our children, the scarcity of job opportunities to the responsibilities given to young people a century or more ago. We delay and postpone adulthood as long as possible. And yet, it is worth remembering that at 17 years of age, George Washington left home to become a surveyor; and a few years later, he was appointed as a district adjutant, with the rank of major in the Virginia militia.
At age of 21, Emil Herman Grubbe, assembled the first X-ray machine in Chicago and used it to treat a woman with recurrent breast carcinoma.
At age of 26, William Bradley Coley joined as a medical doctor the staff of the New York Hospital and at age of 29, he injected his first patient with streptococcal microorganisms to treat a malignant tumor. Today, Coley is considered "the father of immunotherapy".
Is there any good reason to keep the young in school for a long time? Since I am a biologist, I have read that the biomedical knowledge doubles about every 19 years (Smith, R., What clinical information do doctors need? BMJ, 1996. 313(7064): p. 1062-8). It is true that technology and science are dynamic; however, is this is a good excuse to keep the young people longer in school? If yes, the same logic would imply that we should stay in school forever, as new discoveries and knowledge are reported every day. It is obvious that only basic, foundational knowledge and critical reasoning skills should be acquired in school. In addition, there should be novel educational models that support ongoing knowledge upgrades for professionals without taking them away from their families and jobs.
My random lessons/concepts for today are: shorten the schooling period, give our children job responsibilities earlier in life, and prevent the children from inflating their lifestyle.
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