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March 3, 2013 - No Comments!

Schools are outdated

Why everything in the world evolves in such a great way but educational system remains the same from their birth, about 300 years ago? Is such a perfect system that we cannot find a way to make it better? Do we need them anymore?

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We`re in a system that dictates us what to learn, because, as the core values of the system advocate, we should be all the same and we all need to know the same things to get the job done. In fact we are planned to become part of a big machine - of the bureaucratic administrative machine.

Sure - we don`t want that! We are all unique, with our own personality, set of skills that we want to improve, with the curiosity to discover new things and, surely, not the things that everyone already found.

But wait - we`re still going to schools and strive to learn what the old system wants - multiply numbers, memorize statistical data. Things that can be found by just asking a computer newbie.

We learn for many years the equivalent of what a computer does in a split second.

As the Indian teacher, Sugata Mitra, found out with his experiment "Hole in the Wall", the children don`t need a teacher to learn.

His experiments consist in providing access to a public computer, filled with a lot of specific documents, to a group of children from a remote Indian village - they haven't saw any computers by then. He came back in a few months and he discovered an outstanding fact - that the kids taught themselves the content of the documents (even if the documents were written in English - language that they clearly didn`t know).

So why we should keep going to schools? Maybe it's something about society - we see in schools a place to interact with people and their boundaries, a place where you learn to be a "better" person. But are schools supposed to be a place to meet people or a place to learn? There are many other places that are more focused on developing social activities.

There are more and more examples of notable people (like Steve Jobs, Walt Disney or Albert Einstein) that have quit the college and became successful by imagining amazing things.  These people didn't dropped out of school and stopped learning. They went on their own teaching path, benefited and invested their past wasted time into something meaningful.

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Nowadays computers are here - and they can easily replace us at our jobs (the old ones) - and we should stop being that tiny wheel in a big machine.

We have to start finding other ways to be helpful in this world - we have to use those human qualities that a computer will never posses - think imagination, curiosity, spontaneity, instinct, etc. This is our chance to be part of today's evolution.