Introduction
For context, I’ve always been considered a “good student”, and I say that with no boastful intention. I’m the run-of-the-mill “A” student, always ready to do extra credit and succeed in the eyes of whoever is evaluating me.
But recently I’ve come to the realization that this title and identity is entirely worthless in the context of actual knowledge, growth, and understanding the world around me. Some of this is a consequence of my own faults, but I feel as though much of this hollowness can be attributed to the system that raised my intellectual self.
Rewarding the Wrong Thing
The common argument against the traditional educational system is its emphasis on rote memorization. This discussion has been beaten to death, and is not what I want to discuss. Moreover, the ability to memorize and retain some information is a critical skill to have, regardless of the tools available in the contemporary world.
More than the emphasis on memorization, the rewarding of hollow knowledge is the primary fault and root of many of the issues I have with schooling.
Educational “success” is established by performance on exams, homework, essays, and other similarly repetitive and regurgitative formats. In theory, these mechanisms are methods of measuring a student’s understanding of a given subject. However, they ultimately fail to do so because students, like myself, prioritize performance on these examinations over meaningfully understanding the topic at hand.
The question turns from “What does this mean?” to “What would make it look like I know this?”. Students optimize their learning to fit the schema of traditional assessments, falling victim to the cognitive bias of overfitting and becoming unable to apply their knowledge to new domains.
Hustle Culture and the Consequences of Overfitting
Furthermore, the format of schooling misguidedly encourages “the grind” in a way that’s unproductive and ultimately harmful to the cognitive and emotional health of a student. I see it all the time on Reddit and other social media platforms: people bragging about the tens of hours they’ve spent studying, the thousands of words worth of notes they’ve written, etc.
I’ve fallen victim to the phenomenon myself, feeling proud for grinding out pages upon pages of practice problems with the hope of squeezing out an extra percentage point on the next exam. After all, the questions are guaranteed to follow the literal textbook format, so why do anything else?
Schools encourage this behavior. Circling back to the concept of overfitting, the more data points available to you, the more accurately you can fit the curve of academic success. In my personal experience, I can absolutely vouch for the effectiveness of doing practice problems until your brain goes numb.
However, the more tightly fit you are to such a curve, the more inaccurate the results become for any other metric; you lose your ability to generalize.
Endorsing “the grind” accomplishes the goal of ingraining the idea that doing more work, doing more of what you’re told, is what defines success. And if the goal of the system was to produce the perfect machine, the perfect executioner of an instruction set, then they would be successful.
But that isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, the mission. The mission should be to produce a responsive, adaptive, and critical thinker.
Providing Immediate Feedback
Recently, I’ve tried to make an effort to seek out new ideas and learn from sources outside of a school environment. Read more literature, consume the perspectives of experts in various fields, and admittedly, use artificial intelligence to research the topics I’m fascinated in. However, I find the process much harder to drag myself through without the instant feedback and positive affirmations given by traditional schooling.
True learning is filled with delayed gratification; individual efforts make little difference, but they eventually compound and interact with one another in complex ways to produce emergent rewards. But schooling treats learning like a simple, linear, input-output scheme. Consume information in one context, repeat it in the same context, get a reward, repeat.
Learning is an extremely enjoyable process, and I feel as though most people would agree if they redefined learning outside of the context of traditional schooling. We’re innately curious creatures, and have a neuroplastic brain wired to consume information and form connections. But traditional education impairs this superpower by forcing conformation to a rigid rubric and fragmenting our capacity to accept delayed gratification.
Ending Notes
I sincerely believe that every person has a drive to understand the world around them, or at least some specific part of it. I don’t have exact solutions for the problems I’ve outlined here, this is simply an airing of my personal grievances, and I hope to build upon what I’ve started here in the future.
If you relate at all to the problems I’ve been facing, I implore you to try and pursue education through other domains.
Engage your innate drive to learn by seeking knowledge without a rubric to follow, understand that real learning doesn’t have immediate feedback, and try to fall in love with the process rather than an empty reward.