“Our educational system sucks!”, this is what you would usually hear whenever the education subject is on the table, how to change that?

More people are relying on social media, I included, to get updates on what’s going on around the world in real-time, but most of the time, the news you get is not worth the speed you get it at because it costs you your most valuable assets: time & attention. I still remember a time when I waited a whole week, just to buy the weekly sports newspaper to know the scores of all the matches, and if you think about it, it wasn’t that bad, I could spend the week focusing on other things knowing that on Thursday, I will get my “reward” with a moderate dose of dopamine.

But now, whenever your phone vibrates, you expect the next notification to be your crush texting you or an email from last week’s interview telling you that you got your dream job, instead, it is just some $2 recommender system sending you a marketing email about gardening because it thinks you’re a boomer (true story).

We became so much dependent on our phones that you can’t argue with your kid anymore: Why on earth should s/he learn history or Shakespeare if he can “Google” it? Why spend countless hours with a math equation if he can just use an app to solve it? Why study at all if you can be an “influencer” and get rich?

I think the reason why we cannot give absolute answers is that our educational systems are still struggling to catch up to the technological advances, even more, I think it has always been behind. For example, we can say about the myth that Einstein was a poor student, which is not completely false, that the educational system couldn’t detect his genius using the traditional methods, and if he wasn’t tenacious enough, he could’ve taken the blue pill after his first rejection, and switch his career to what society would expect from someone with his grades.

Opposed to the previous blue pill example, the red pill is now unfortunately linked to conspiracy theories, misinformation, and online toxicity that may push you to consider taking the blue one, and the people behind things like QAnon and Pizzagate, are ruining the concept of red pill presented by Morpheus, which is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave framed in the context of a science fiction movie, that shows the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature in his work: Republic.

I quote a very insightful paragraph that I read a long time ago from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One :

This is a simple truth, but we’ve all been trained to ignore it. Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition. Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student’s competitiveness; pupils with the highest marks receive status and credentials. We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.

And it gets worse as students ascend to higher levels of the tournament. Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Then what is success exactly? Society tends to have a narrow perception of success and uses metrics such as money, influence, or performance level. But is that it? Should you keep feeding your need to please society, get its approval, and shape yourself based on that? The answer is: it depends on who you are, and what personality you have. In short, there are two major classes: Extrinsic and Intrinsic motivators. As Tyler Durden said: “We buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t like, and the things you own end up owning you.”, which represents most individuals of our societies today, and it is usually driven by the external motivation to please the others, and building a public image of a fictional life that is far from reflecting our personal lives. On the other hand, an example of an intrinsically motivated person is someone who at least “believes” that s/he has a goal and is working towards achieving that goal, independently from the nature of that goal, it is usually referred to as the top of Maslow’s triangle: Self-actualization or self-accomplishment.

But to go back to the subject of this article, I think society should focus more on getting knowledge over money or power (but power is power, right Cersei?), because “those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it”, and all the great civilizations, however powerful they were, they all fell because they resisted the change and did not adapt to it, and this modern times, it isn’t a Roman or an Ottoman empire that is falling, but humanity as whole facing a common enemy: extinction. It is not okay that we are in 2020, and there are people still thinking that climate change is a hoax, or that the earth is flat, but we need to stop looking down on them but try to help them because they are victims of our ecosystem, which was, is and will always favor short-term rewards over the well-being of the future generations.

But just because we are fighting for one problem, does not mean that we are not causing others, and that is why I would like you as a reader to comment and give your opinion.