This topic has been on my mind for several months and I really think it's something we should stop and take a look at as a society. Like many of you I've been part of the traditional education system, I went to school for 12 years, University for 4 years and then found a job and began my career, pretty basic stuff. I never excelled in any of my subjects nor was I very interested in any the course material I studied at University. I just did it because, well that's what you're supposed to do, I guess. I just didn't see any value in the experience gained through the entire process.
As the age-old saying goes knowledge is power but this blanket statement cannot necessarily hold true in all instances. Knowledge/Information is probably the most unregulated commodity in the world. You can get free information or you could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a formal education or even a book for that matter.
Why? Because certain knowledge has more value than others. Some knowledge can generate more value than other knowledge. While knowledge is a fluid and fickle thing and can become outdated very quickly as new trends occur. I remember a few years ago being an app developer was the position to go for, now if you're into cloud services or blockchain you're the darling of the tech world.
So why if this is the case why are we still teaching kids concepts and ways of thinking that are old, outdated and not conducive to being competitive in the modern world and job market. Why are we giving them knowledge without power? Would that then be paradoxical by definition?
Free education is not the silver bullet to success
The economy is in the shitter and when that happens the cry for education and specifically free education becomes very loud. It's a simple equation, if we have more skilled people, we have a better labour force, which means companies can select quality candidates with high output and create more wealth than before. That's the dream, but that is a misguided dream and it's sadly not the case.
The amount of value generating jobs that require degrees of a certain nature are so small and free education will only serve to oversaturate the market. This oversupply will then either take on jobs they were not trained for or sit at home feeling sorry for themselves. They were sold a narrative that didn't pan out and they would have the right to be pissed off.
Secondly, with the speed at which the markets move plenty of degrees are obsolete by the time you hit the job market. in 4 or 5 years of studying so much has changed that when you lucky enough to use your expensive admission card called a degree and get accepted into your industry of choice you quickly find out you need to start learning from scratch.
Essentially it's like saying let's give all these kids free bicycles and when they finally leave their sheltered safe space created for them by regulation they find they're completely obsolete when travelling on a highway that only caters for cars at high speeds.
Image source: Pexels
An attitude for aptitude
The current education system is designed to firstly expose you into a broad range of interests when you start your schooling career and then allow you to gradually find your fields of interest that you will eventually specialise in. I personally don't see the value in every single child needing 16 years of schooling to figure that out and some. It should be the responsibility of parents and educators to identify where their kid's interests lie, do they have an aptitude for it and then encourage the positive attitudes that will foster their interest into a value generating skill.
If a child as an affinity for a STEM subject says electrical engineering. Why not encourage them by putting them into an institution that focuses on this and expedites their growth. This may not even be a traditional education but perhaps shadowing/interning at a company where the child can get the first-hand experience in the field.
Teaching skills, not knowledge
The current education system is focused far too much on pushing knowledge, facts, figures, rules and regulations that need to be memorized and regurgitated via testing. This sort of system doesn't do much for fostering skill unless that skill is memory recall. Education needs to take a turn to a more hybrid solution or even a simulation of an actual industry in order to give kids first-hand experience in what they will do.
I studied marketing and I can personally say never did or applied a damn thing that was said in that textbook when I was in the field. We learned traditional marketing mediums and when I got into the field search engine marketing was huge, social media marketing had just started to become popular and app marketing was starting to surface. I was not prepared for any of it and had to spend my own time researching and learning on the job.
Skills with value
It is the responsibility of educational institutions to create products that essentially pass a value that can create an active return on investment. If I'm paying R200 000 for a 4-year course, I should be able to learn a skill that returns that investment faster than it would if I did not have that skill. Certain skills need to be charged accordingly at a fair market rate based on the current demand for the skill and they should fluctuate as the market does. This blanket pricing strategy only serves to create a fast food education system. Order, pick up and go!
Certain courses should be chopped, new ones added each year, courses need to be augmented and updated and kept as relevant as possible and pricing needs to reflect that. If I'm learning things that will be outdated in 5 years why am I paying premium pricing?
Its the administrations job to constantly evaluate, iterate and maintain a level of skill quality per customer/learner equal that has merit to the cost. Which I don't think they do, you pay, you receive a sub-par skill and then made to feel less than when you're found to not be valued in the job market. Talk about major post-purchase cognitive dissonance
The needs of the market
In order to achieve my previous point of maintaining skills with value, you need to look at the needs of the market. The current education system is a slow bureaucratic mess and cannot make reactional changes that actually serve their customers "the students". I'm paying for a service and you're giving them a shit service and they don't care.
Everything is a slow arduous process and they cannot react to market changes to better serve the job market. As a service provider, educational institutions should fundamentally be held accountable for their outputs and the direction of their outputs which I firmly believe they do not.
If we have an oversupply of a certain skill why arent admissions reduced? Why aren't courses removed from permanently or temporarily? Why aren't kids deferred to opportunities where they can study and have the assurance find work in that field for the next 5 - 10 years post-graduation? This to me makes no sense! Not in the modern day and age where job data is freely available.
When I speak about this I do not refer to only academic education, I refer to trade skills and as well as service based skills. I feel it is almost criminal at this point to sell a child a false narrative of this be whatever you want to be and they study surface design, or liberal arts and find out their skill isn't needed! This is not only a waste of monetary resources but human capital. What is the point of having a highly educated labour force in terms of academics but they have to skills that can generate value?
The opportunity cost
If that was not soul destroying enough for these kids you now spent them into the world 4 or 5 years older, with no real job skill, no job experience, no ability of applied thinking and a mountain of debt to repay. So basically you robbed them of actual value generating experience and education for an artificial education that is decreed as valuable via a piece of paper rather than tangible and actionable skill.
The monetary cost
When you have a financial burden like student debt you cannot afford to take risks, you can't wait it out, or take on the nomad or freelancer road. You need to start making a stable income immediately and more often than not you could have gotten that job without a degree that is now paying off your degree. So more often than not you basically take 4 years and a whole lot of money to end up where you could have been prior to entering the educational system.
Have your say
What do you think of the current education system? Is it a fit for the modern world? Is it a square solution in a dynamic environment? Is it a case of if you have a hammer everything has to be a nail?
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