Being Schooled Is Not The Same As Being Educated. Here’s Why…

Albert was only 4 years old when his parents decided to enroll him in one of the best schools of his town.

Being a playful little child, Albert was keen to join the institution and was terribly curious to spend his entire twelve years of childhood in a room, thinking that the institution would help him become a great human being and would satisfy his thirst for knowledge.

He did hard work year after year, and completed his twelve years of schooling with flying colors. Everybody was happy- teachers, parents, almost everyone.

Would you, dear reader, not be happy if you were in his place?

I would definitely be.

One fine evening while lying down in his garden, the memories of school enraptured the heart of Albert and he went into a state of complete regret.

He reflected over the fragments of boredom that accompanied him and his friends in the class where almost every teacher only taught one thing- pass the next exam.

It’s okay if you don’t understand it, just memorize it and get an A on your exam!” his teachers used to say.

He remembered the “empty facts” he memorized, and the sheer amount of work he put in to pass those useless exams. With all this in his head, he came to a harsh, but real, conclusion about his schooling. In his own words,

“Everyone around me was taught the philosophy of cramming the subject matter and getting A’s in exams so as to prove our worth as intelligent students. We had to manage grades and not knowledge. The classmates were not friends but competitors and we had to get ahead each one of us. It was a race to becoming functional illiterates rather than educated humans.”

This gave birth to a common massive mentality — Why help my classmate? Why not deceive them to reduce my competition in the race to college?

Albert’s school life filled him with guilt and frustration. His once creative mind which began with passion for learning was now reduced to a mere empty spiritless competitive machine.

And this machine is far from the values that Albert once aspired to have.

. . .

So What Went Wrong?

Why school failed Albert becoming a better human being?

Humans by their very nature are moral, spiritual and intellectual beings. In order to become the better version of being a human, a common system was created to fulfill that aim. This gave rise to public schools.

They were designed to teach individuals how to think rightly, to promote intellectual curiosity and to produce citizens that are healthy in mind, body, and spirit.

And this is why people have viewed public schooling as the primary institution where children go to become a better human being. However, it is now clearly evident that the school system greatly diverges from the very aim it was built for because the system has not been molded according to the needs of the present. It has been unchanged for more than 100 years.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new” -Socrates

Seeing the decline of the modern education system, one is compelled to ask…

‘What Is Education Anyway ?’

Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, and habits.

It is all about learning to carry yourself.

When we go back to the root of the word education, it is derived from the Latin word “Edu care” which means to lead out of or to draw out what is already in there.

As Galileo Galilei, one of the well known polymath from Pisa said,

"We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves."

In other words, education is the nourishment of good qualities in a man and drawing out the best in him. Education seeks to nurture the in borne inner capacities of an individual.

To be truly educated means developing the knowledge and skill to look beyond the standard meaning to find the hidden complexity. Education is meant to teach people about everything around them, and provide the necessary skills to navigate the world.

John Taylor Gatto, an American author and a school teacher who taught for more than 30 years all over America writes in his book

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling —

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whoever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”

Why do students dread school education?

I remember my school days were full of boredom and passivity.

Have you gone through the same? Comment below because I want to know if it’s common or only individual experience.

My days were filled with questions like “ Why am I studying this topic? What is the meaning behind studying arithmetic and geometry? Why should I care about the solution of a quadratic equation?

There are no overarching meaning to what schools teach, no real educational philosophy behind the subjects being taught.

Growing up I realized that most of what I studied in school amounted to nothing.

According to Lord Alfred Whitehead, one of the greatest mathematicians of nineteenth and twentieth century said —

“The Single most important form of mathematics is statistics”, which modern-day schools don’t even teach at the high school level.

Schools and colleges have now become a place where you go to learn how to do something as a vocation and earn a livelihood from it. It is no longer a place to pursue truth but a place to pursue money. And because those making the most money are those who are most adept at cheating, cheating has now become widespread to an extent that it is considered as a norm and not an exception in most of the institutions to pass through the exams.

John Taylor Gatto formulates the reality of schools very well in his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling when he writes --

“I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides, and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although some teachers do care about their students and work hard for them the institution itself is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”

Moreover, the sheer amount of pressure and stress that students face in the highly competitive entrance exams, which is done by grading system, is unprecedented. It has been reported that -

“Suicides among children and young adults peak at the beginning of exam season, it has emerged, adding to fears that pressure to get good results is harming their mental health.”

In Conclusion

We must know that learning is all about discovery. In order to get back to our traditional roots of learning, we must not let our innate curiosity and the sense of wonder and joy in discovering little things that were once unknown to us die out.

Because as Albert Einstein said

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.

The Take Away Point

It must be remembered that true education starts from the cradle and ends at the grave. We must always look for the things that make us ecstatic just to learn about them, be it mathematics, music, literature, or art because…

Being educated is far different from being schooled and one must not consider them synonymous.

In our next blog, we’ll deal with the solutions to combat the compulsory modern day schooling and will discuss ways in which one can not let his schooling interfere with his education.

Comment below if you agree or disagree.