education

I’m going to write from the perspective of a high iq autodidactic individual who values self determination and autonomy above anything else.

public schools

Designed to break your autonomy and resistance to authority, from the first day you’re forced to sit still for hours and do as you are told, when you are told and how you are told. If you resist, you get sanctioned. Either you will be told to do more stuff (eg. repeatedly write a sentence or copy a paragraph) or you will be punished (eg. detention, suspension, expulsion). The goal is to break your autonomy and make you a good worker. A good worker is someone who waits for instruction and does as he is told without question.

Education boils down to obedience training - as you would train a dog. A dog works for treats and his training is basically just conditioning his behavior to get treats by following instruction. Children do not get treats, they get grades. Grades are a form of social currency. They are a way to measure your worth in society, your obedience to authority, your ability to follow instruction. The child’s parents believe in this reward because they were taught to and their parents believed in it for the same reason. If you follow this back a few generations, you arrive at a point in time when education actually did result in better lives, but that has been out of date for at least 3 generations at the time of writing. If you go back to the 1950s it still does not work. The world has changed and the system has not.

university

You pay twice for your education: once with money and once with time. – AI generated

A waste of time and money for most professions. If there is no danger to human life you can learn everything you need on your own. I might not want a surgeon to trial and error his skills on life human beings, but if you’re in a theoretical field there’s no reason not to. Most practical fields are of no danger to anyone but yourself either. Additionally, every degree is bundled together with subjects that have no relevance to what you want to do. Even if university access is free in your country, it is still too expensive to attend.

University standardizes the knowledge of different fields. It is a way to make sure that everyone has the same knowledge. – AI generated

Let’s take computer science as an example here, as I had to interview my fair share of graduates.

I’m a senior now and throughout the years I’ve had to hold the hands of alot of juniors and get them started. On average, compsci graduates have all the same skills. You have 50 graduates who have learned the identical stuff applying for the job, interview one of them and you know all of them. They are useless. You have to spell out every step of the way for them to know what they are supposed to do and then hold their hand till the end. If you get a CV without a portfolio of projects they did on their own time that resume goes into the trash. It takes way less time to teach a self-taught programmer the obscure but useful things compsci graduates understand than teaching those graduates how to be a competent programmer.

This is not my opinion, this is first-hand real-world experience.

Nowdays you’re lucky if you can dump a folder of creds and profiles on a new hire and say “there you go, that has your wiregurad profile, your company password manager and your creds for internal services, please setup your laptop and clone this repo”. Most won’t be able to figure it out on their own, which is quite an achievement if you consider they have a compsci degree.

testing

Testing measures your short-term memory first and foremost. That’s why testing has been dumbed down over the years, lowering the passing scores, simplifying the language of the questions. As soon as there’s complex syntax used and variables hidden in the query, the conditioned child will no longer be able to process the information and draw conclusions. Children have been conditioned to follow clear instruction, with every step of the way being verbosely defined. Nothing is left to the imagination. The child was not allowed to think for himself, be creative or autonomous. And now it can’t be.

The purpose of exams is not to measure your knowledge, it is to measure your obedience to authority. – AI generated

jobs

Now you’re prepared to join the workforce. You will be doing as you are told for the next 50 years until retirement. For a fraction of the money you could have made if you had been self-employed. Well, at least that’s what I’d have said 5 years ago, now post-covid, all the small businesses went bankrupt and the big guys bought all of it up. So now you’re stuck in the workforce.

retirement & beyond

Your body is tired now and will cease to function shortly after. This is the time when you won’t have regrets like “Oh I wish i studied harder, worked harder, spent more time in the office”. You will be in denial. You will be happy that you can finally rest and live your life, not allowing thoughts like “I could have done that from the beginning”, “I’ve wasted my life playing a game that wasnt worth playing”. You will have health issues from age and exhaustion and won’t be able to really live your life now.

The energy you once had will have faded and as the darkness approaches, you will finally have the courage to admit to yourself and your children that you’ve wasted your life. That you should have spent more time with your family and doing things you wanted to do. You will tell your children to take it easy and follow their dreams, to not worry about what everyone else thinks about you. Like your grandparents told you, but you didn’t believe. But it’s too late for your children now. They’re adults and in the middle of the same game you’ve lost, and they will lose too, because like yourself, they were conditioned to follow instruction and do as they are told, just not your last instruction, but the instruction of the system.

conclusion

The educational system works as intended but not for the benefit of the students. It is a system that is designed to produce workers for the economy. The system is not designed to produce critical thinkers, innovators, or entrepreneurs but to produce good consumers who will buy the products and services of the economy, citizens who will pay taxes and obey the laws, soldiers who will fight for the country, drones who will do as they are told and not question authority. Slaves.