School is a universal experience that can both liberate and oppress. Some of us loved it, some loathed it, and many people around the world still fight for the right to access it. The ability and desire for all people to have access to basic education is one of the most outstanding evolutions of human society, allowing us to progress over the last few thousand years to expand the potential of our entire species and support more equitable access to opportunities around the world.
Yet, the standard dominant model of education in established and increasingly emerging economies focuses on a reductive and rigid approach to building knowledge, enforcing conformity of the mind and often dulling curiosity, because at its core, it is designed to reinforce the status quo of the day. This is not new. The history of education over the past few thousand years shows that it was built from the beginning as a system to reinforce hierarchy, status, and obedience.
How Schools Kill Creativity?
" I never let school get in the way of my education " — Mark Twain
We usually tend to confuse learning with schooling, but in fact, these are two different things. The lessons needed for life are often not taught in schools. Many of them are learned thorough sets experience as one's life unfolds. For many, school was more of a prison where you are taught how to think, how to behave, and how to function within a rigid, bell-ridden system that was designed to prepare young minds for the workforce through the standard technique of memorizing and regurgitating information in a test-based environment.
In order to succeed in this mandatory system, we all have to learn how to think about complex phenomena in the world in constricted, reductive, linear, and siloed ways. Everything is put into boxes, science over here and language over there. This helps us learn how to break the world down into individual and manageable parts so that we can then put them together in an ordered way and conform to the pre-established system of the day. As a result, for many people, schools do a massive disservice— rebels drop out, creatives fail, people are bullied for ‘not fitting in’, and all the non-linear learners struggle to get through.
“Many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing they were good at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.” — Sir Ken Robinson
Modern schools
Schools these days are structured around predetermined subjects and delineated by very specific chunks of time, with bells to indicate when to move, eat, and pee, all the while being rife with standardized tests and rote-learning textbooks. If you conjure up a mental image of school, you will probably have some form of tables and chairs all pointing toward a blackboard/whiteboard/smartboard and a single human instructor explaining how to do something.
Where nowadays the bigger questions around school are often focused on how to get more kids to graduate, or whether or not teachers should be armed with guns, perhaps instead the questions should be: Do the schools that we have designed best suit the world we are entering into? Has the old industrial form of education that our current system is based upon become obsolete? How can schools be designed to prepare young people for a changing world with increased needs for circular and systems thinking along with skills for a future that will be very different from the industrial age of the past?
Stuffing and flogging?
One of the most shocking things about the modern schooling system is that whilst you may think that beating with canes or paddles to control wandering young minds and reinforce obedience was the common and oft-used form of discipline in the past, there are currently 69 countries, including the US and Australia, that still allow corporal punishment in schools.
The education system is oppressively designed as a “banker-style” system where students are viewed as empty bank accounts waiting to be filled up by the authoritative teacher who installs credits in the form of knowledge. This, in essence, reinforces oppression through the fundamental notion that the student is just waiting for instructions to conform to the predetermined status quo.
In general, schools today have become places where we actively discourage thinking that is not predefined, approved, and stamped by the larger social system of the day; as such, schools reinforce a reward system based on consumption, acquisition, and status increases. This, in turn, perpetuates humans being disconnected from nature and from the relationships that make up the systems around us.
The construction of knowledge
The reality is that most of the things we learn in life come from the act of living — knowledge is built through the sets of experience and interactions we have with the world around us, not through what a rigid system of conformity that expects us to regulate to and regurgitate information from demands of us.
Can you recall the content of a test you took in school? What was it on and what do you remember of it? Now, in contrast, think of a challenge you overcame as a kid, like when you learned to ride a bike or how to navigate a complex argument with a young friend. It’s much easier to recall that experience, right?
If you tell someone that the only way they will be successful is to conform to a system of multiple choice answers, then you teach someone to turn off their creativity, kill their curiosity, and condition them to only live within the status quo.
The reductive thinking
The idea that the world can be broken down into manageable bitesize parts is a particular way of approaching the infinite complexity of the world around us. It helps the human mind make sense of existence and lays out the steps of a process so that an end goal can be achieved.
This has all helped humans become immensely successful at mass production and manufacturing, and at science and technology, which are great things that we should all be very proud of. However, the natural world is not a machine, nor is the human mind. Whereas humans are thought to enjoy order and control, nature likes chaos and diversity — two things that humans have worked on systematically designing out of our modern lives, mainly through industrial education.
In schools, we conform to reductionism as the dominant way of viewing the world, as we are repeatedly exposed to it from the way we learn subjects in isolation; math, science, and language, for example, are all taught in individual parts, rather than teaching the interconnectedness of science being reliant on math and that language is itself a science.
Built on the past, our standard education system of today continues to be designed to suspend nonlinear thoughts and prescribe tight restrictions (and even abuse) on young people who don’t conform to the predetermined mold of what a student, and by extension, a good citizen, should be. It can even be argued that standardized testing (the foundation of most modern schools) is a form of oppression of the mind, where the student must learn to routinely conform their thinking to the rigid structure of a testing environment and ‘know’ that there is only one answer to any given problem!.
The Need for Systems Thinking
Every system is made up of interconnected and interdependent parts. Nothing lives in isolation. So when one views the world as things in isolation, the outcome is linear thinking — which in turn has bred a linear, reductive and wasteful economic system.
We have designed our minds to want simple solutions to complex problems, to avoid chaos, and to believe that we are isolated from the natural world — that we are literally ‘a part’ from, not apart of, nature.
Schools are often designed for the passive absorbing and regurgitating pieces of knowledge determined by a system set on reinforcing itself, so one can only assume that the objective is to control and form the minds of young people to ‘fit in’ with the dominant system of the day.
Without the ability to think in systems, and appreciate the complex, interconnected, and interdependent aspects of the systems that make up the world around us, we perpetuate a worldview that limits each individual and the collective potential to solve and evolve complex problems. We’re shortchanging not just our educational experiences, but also the Earth as a whole.
Experiential and Critical Pedagogy
Pedagogical approaches that focus on experiences, like problem-based learning and participatory-action research, are designed to allow the individual to actively participate in the world around them and thus form their own thoughts, cognitive pathways, and practical experiences of a given subject or topic area. Furthermore, allowing students to learn how their brain works supports better learning.
Perhaps the best starting point for educational redesign is to focus on a life-learning model where humans are encouraged to see experience as the main provider of knowledge, where schools are places of exploration, experimentation, and community development — as well as places that teach life skills.
Learning through doing enables the learner to self-associate the new knowledge and connect the neurological dots between their own life and the world around them. Experience mixes in challenges and problem solving with criticality and teaches everyone that not getting it right the first time is OK!
If we don’t change the way we share knowledge and prepare young people for life, then we will continue to encounter the same problems in the world that we are grappling with today, since we will reinforce linear and reductive thinking as we go about creating the same type of thinkers that created those problems to begin with.
" We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them " — Albert Einstein
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