Beyond the Classroom
Distinguishing Between Academic Success and Real-World Success
Situations in school train us for situations in the world beyond.
I like to ask my students some questions throughout the school year to show them how some of their thought patterns may not be well received in the workplace.
Some of these questions include:
Do you think your boss will care if you don’t feel like coming to work today?
Do you think your boss will give you a retake?
Do you think your boss will excuse them if they are absent without proper communication?
If there is one thing to get from school it is to learn how to do tasks even when you don't want to.
School is an opportunity to train yourself in the face of what you don't like.
Competition
A portion of Peter Thiel's book Zero to One outlines how the academic system incentivizes thought patterns that are maladaptive to the world beyond the classroom.
“Competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.”
“Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition."
"Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student’s competitiveness; pupils with the highest marks receive status and credentials.”
This happens as young as 4 or 5 years old. Kids are learning to build their identity based on how competitive they are with their peers.
“We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences.”
“Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior, while children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.”
Learning is a more dynamic process than what acceptable behavior is in a classroom. Education is similar to the electromagnetic spectrum - we only see a small portion of it, but there is so much more that is there.
Learning can be more than what we normalize in classrooms.
“Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them."
"Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation”
Academic success incentivizes blindly following the competition, which can be dangerous.
Thiel also provides a short story about big tech that illustrates the danger of focusing on competition.
“Let’s test the Shakespearean model in the real world. Imagine a production called Gates and Schmidt, based on Romeo and Juliet. Montague is Microsoft. Capulet is Google. Two great families, run by alpha nerds, sure to clash on account of their sameness.
As with all good tragedy, the conflict seems inevitable only in retrospect. In fact it was entirely avoidable. These families came from very different places. The House of Montague built operating systems and office applications. The House of Capulet wrote a search engine. What was there to fight about?
Lots, apparently. As a startup, each clan had been content to leave the other alone and prosper independently. But as they grew, they began to focus on each other. Montagues obsessed about Capulets obsessed about Montagues. The result? Windows vs. Chrome OS, Bing vs. Google Search, Explorer vs. Chrome, Office vs. Docs, and Surface vs. Nexus.
Just as war cost the Montagues and Capulets their children, it cost Microsoft and Google their dominance: Apple came along and overtook them all. In January 2013, Apple’s market capitalization was $500 billion, while Google and Microsoft combined were worth $467 billion. Just three years before, Microsoft and Google were each more valuable than Apple."
"Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past."
"Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.
"Competition is a destructive force instead of a sign of value"
Competition in the world of academics is a sign of value and it is useful to be competitive with your classmates. However, this competitive bias is dangerous in the world beyond.
“Just in Case” Information vs. “Just in Time” Information
Most of the concepts in school don't help students build a coherent picture of the world.
The students learn how to graph conic sections without getting a chance to build anything with that information.
Everything we teach is out of context.
Kids are confused about how things fit together. They are being overloaded with information just in case they need it instead of learning information just in time.
Just in case information is useful for success in the academic world.
Just in time information is useful for success in the world beyond.
Everyone Has a Proper Place in the Pyramid
Schools teach students that they must stay in the class where they belong.
They learn how to stay put, mature at the same rate as everyone else, and fit the mold of the "perfect" student.
Schools have an orderly category for everyone, which teaches the students to seek status, compete, and please adults.
Instead, they need to learn how to learn and collaborate.
Learning and collaboration are much more useful in the world beyond. Especially when compared to status-seeking, competing, and people-pleasing.
Don't Care Too Much
Students are forced to turn their interests on and off as soon as the bell rings or as soon as a unit is over. Regardless of how much they liked studying a topic, they have to move on because the system has told them to.
It becomes increasingly difficult for a student to follow their obsessions or dive deep into topics they genuinely love.
The ones who end up diving deeper or following their obsessions end up "falling behind" because they are not keeping up with the pace of the curriculum.
Some of the most rewarding and useful work in the "real world" comes from diving deep and obsession.
Schools need to incentivize diving deep and obsession, but they probably won't. So we need to cultivate and nourish these impulses within ourselves. We need to recognize when we want to dive deep and when we are obsessed because that is what leads to success in the world beyond.
Emotional Reliance
Students learn how they should feel based on the feedback their teacher gives them.
As much as we should encourage students to develop their emotional connections, they learn emotional dependence through grades, prizes, and punishments.
I see this all the time as a teacher. My body language is one of my strongest tools in the classroom...and it really shouldn't be.
Students are conditioned to feel what their teachers want them to feel and have little opportunities for emotional independence.
The world beyond demands emotional independence and students can only solve meaningful problems if they are connected to their emotions informed by their unique experiences.
Intellectual Reliance
Students rarely have a chance to think for themselves in the world of academics. The best students wait for the teacher to tell them what to do, tell them what to learn, and tell them what to think.
Students learn to let other people determine the meaning of their lives.
If they do things their way or ask hard questions they are quickly labeled as "problems."
There is almost no opportunity to develop their ideas. Students are rewarded for championing the ideas of the teachers.
The world beyond demands that people develop their ideas and determine their meaning.
Provisional Self-Esteem
The world of academics creates situations where students learn that their worth comes from what a professional thinks of them.
Students learn that they should not trust themselves, but instead rely on the evaluations of their report cards, grades, or trained professionals.
To succeed in the world of academics, we have to suspend our trust in ourselves to make room for professionals to evaluate us.
The world beyond demands that we trust ourselves. This is a critical first step in any worthwhile endeavor.
No Privacy or Personal Space. Little to No Rights.
In traditional schools, students are always watched and under consistent surveillance.
This prevents students from developing true autonomy and can lead to problems like overusing screens. (Screens are typically an escape method.)
In the world beyond the classroom, people discover creative solutions when they have the freedom to experiment, fail, and experiment again.
Constant evaluation kills this dynamic and prevents creative problem-solving.
Where does this leave us?
Real World Success is determined by different metrics and values than Academic Success.
Now, the academic world is not inherently bad. There are just unintended effects of the dated and centralized system.
Independent thinkers and innovators are the antidote to many of these issues.
This is largely why independent thought is so critical, especially in alternative education.
There are many people frustrated with the current state of the traditional education system and are taking it into their own hands.
Many people are calling for system reform, combining existing systems, or even starting their schools.
In a 2015 interview, Elon Musk shared two core principles that would guide the school he wants to start:
1. Ditch the assembly line model — no grade levels.
Allow the students to operate at the level that they are, not the level the system thinks they are in.
Age segregation doesn't work because kids have different aptitudes and interests that vary across time.
2. Problem-focused, not tool-focused.
This prioritizes the idea of "just in time" information over "just in case" information. The students have a problem and will learn along the way. This allows them to build with the information they are learning, which provides more neural connections. This improves retention and relevance for more efficient and effective learning.
Learning to use tools is pointless and boring unless those tools help you solve a real problem.
We can build our education.