Your formal education ends here
Why your formal education should end early
Children are no different today. When I graduated from college with a degree in music education in 1975, part of the valedictorian speech was, “Your formal education ends here…” Soon after, we all tossed our caps in the air and ran for the exits.
Summer vacation usually begins with the kids home schooling, Alice Cooper’s anti-school anthem “School’s Out” still ringing in their impressionable young ears. It seems the main thing they learned in school this year was, “I can’t wait to get out of this place; I can’t wait for school to end.”
Unfortunately, there are many people my age, far too many, truth be told, who actually boast that they haven’t picked up a book for the purpose of learning something new since they finished their studies some 35 or 40 years ago.
Formal education is good… up to a point
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind receiving the basic three R’s through my formal education: reading, writing, and arithmetic! (Hey, don’t laugh. This is NOTHING compared to the way kids today write via online chats and texts!)
My argument is that while three or four years of solid fundamentals would have been more than enough, it is the misdirected and force-fed “application” that offended me and rebelled against so strongly. And yet, compared to what kids bring home for homework these days, I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
My book reports consisted of sufficient proof that I actually read the text. Most of the time they asked me to include my opinion about what I thought about the writing; whether I liked it or not.
Formal education? This is crazy!
Today’s curriculum requires students to dissect and analyze each character. Then they have to do the same with the structure of each sentence, paragraph, page, and chapter. No more getting away with, “I liked it because…”
Instead of fostering a love of learning by working with each child’s natural curiosity, today’s educational system is littered with useless and impractical “must have” exercises that not only bore and disengage students, but actually quench the love of learning altogether.
Fortunately, I wake up every day with an insatiable appetite for seeking knowledge; to learn something new and useful. My own training experience was not able to get me to love learning. I wouldn’t let them.
Take a break from formal education
I’m not sure if today’s kids will be as lucky considering the current state of formal education. The system seems to be designed to produce more and more droids, inevitably destined to become drones in the future of society.
Leaders need their curiosity and love of learning not only intact, but stimulated. Today’s most visionary leaders—Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Richard Branson, and a handful of others like them—broke away from traditional educational systems that threatened to stifle, if not steal, their God-given gifts to bring true value to the world. Imagine what would have happened if these people chose to settle, to be another ‘droid’ mass produced by formal education.
In my experience, real life learning takes place outside the confines of the school. In fact, that was the end of the valedictorian’s speech at my college graduation ceremony on June 8, 1975, “Your formal education ends here… now your REAL education begins!”