What they don’t teach you at School

October 27, 2007 by gbrown

What they don’t teach you at ~~Harvard Business~~ school

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it” Einstein

Few would argue with the concept that schools should prepare us for life.

Much of what we know and practise today can be traced back to a schoolhood memory - passing notes in chemistry class, the new girl from out of town, smoking in the bikesheds, flunking off sports to go play in the arcades and so on. Sweet memories.

There was also the career advisory service, which I’ll come back to in a minute.

Popular culture often portrays our memories of school through a nostaglic lens. School was always better in your day, regardless of your age.

Yet some truths about education are timeless. There have always been remarkable teachers whose words and, more often, behaviours you carry with you to your adult life. There was always the kid that came last but went on to become a successful entrepreneur. And, without fail, like Pigpen there was always the kid that smelled…

Education will always been an emotive issue. It’s about your kids, and its about your childhood and it’s about how you see the world. One the one hand, our performance in the 3Rs are overshadowed by our counterparts in Singapore and Japan. Look how they recite Pi to the 24th significant figure! Our media reminds us how schooling was always better when we were at school and how shameful our standards now are.

On the other hand, it is the same nostalgic memories that fuel reports, such as this one, stating that our education system is making the kids anixous or grow up too early.

In the context of poor standards, it’s subjective. In my day, I had to remember the names and dates of all the Kings and Queens of England since Harold less I failed my history exam. In an era when information is at our fingertips and I can get that information here anyway, should we place the premium on memory skills or creativity? Just as Einstein famously couldn’t answer the hack’s maths equation and Henry Ford the dates and names of US generals when impeached, memorizing large amounts of data has never created a genius.

As for answering the question of schools making them grow up too fast. If you trust your own memory then it probably is, but if you trust the facts then probably not.

100 years ago, you’d be lucky to get a schooling unless you were privileged. My Scottish forebears worked the cotton mills of Paisley and the shipyards of Govan. Most were out working manual labour by the13th birthday and, God forbid, if you were a girl you could have been married off in your teens. That was, of course, if you made it to that age at all.

School is, and always will be, a vehicle to provide society with its economic needs. Questions as to whether it was better, back then, are largely irrelevant as those needs will have changed. What is important now is, whether the skills taught today will remain relevant for tomorrow.

As Peter Drucker states in “Management Challenges for the 21st Century”, the only skill we’ll need in the 21st Century is the ability to learn new skills. Cited by Stephen Covey in the 8th Habit, Covey goes on to challenge the emphasis placed on educating content. “The content we learn in education will become largely irrelevant within 2 years of learning it.”

So the real challenge in today’s educational system is not teaching content, but the skills to learn. Ironically, none of my teachers ever told me about the importance of learning after University, self-development or making learning a daily habit. For years they had tried to fill our brains with content yet not taking a single minute to explain how to use that brain properly.

It isn’t about the teachers, there are many good ones but the system fails them. What education fails to do is equip our children with the skills that will help them succeed in our global economy. Here are just some of the examples:

No cheating
If you share your answers in the exam hall you’ll fail. You’ll not only fail you’ll get thrown out and penalized. So will the other guy. Try that approach to solving problems in business and see how long you last. What we should be doing is measuring our kids on team work, creativity and collective problem solving.

Good all-rounder
“B,B,B” scores better than “A,E,E” in grades but how many companies can survive being good at most things rather than being outstanding in one. Google didn’t focus on being a “good” online retailer, Jaiku a blogging platform or Amazon a social networking service. Similarly, would Google pick a candidate who was good both at programming and business studies or an outstanding programmer?

As Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft said, a top programmer does not outperform an average programmer by a factor of 5 or 10, but by a factor of 10,000 times.The free market rewards only the best in their respective fields. That’s one for business studies. As one successful Indian tech CEO once told me, “I don’t have any designs for my boy’s life, as long as he’s the best he can be in whatever he does. And if that means being the best the best vegetable seller there is, then I’ll be proud of him”.

Life skills
Perhaps the biggest challenges I have faced in life have been starting a business, buying a house, health, finance and relationships. School, however, insisted on teaching me useless maxims such as “neither a borrower nor a lender be”, “meat and 2 veg”, “job security and a good benefits package” and “time management”… all of which would drive a man to middle class mediocrity, and as Kiyosaki would put it “middle class poverty”. Not forgetting, of course, an unhealthy diet. How much better equipped would our children be, for example, if we taught them about credit cards, mortgages, the global economy and the myth of job security at high school?

Sit down, shut up
When the teacher came into the room, we were told to sit down, shut up and open our books at page 35. If you are reactive, life will pass you by.

We fear that if we are not in control, they’ll run riot. That’s only because we see things through our own industrial paradigm that required subservience at the factory level. What I, and I guess all of us, really learned at school and university were life skills. I learned that all people weren’t white, that Jews could also be English, that each classroom was a microworld where each kid filled his own ecological niche – “joker”, “bully”, “nerd”, “cool guy” or whatever.

Anybody who’s read the seminal book authored by Mark McCormack and mentioned in the title will understand that success in business, like in any endeavour, does not revolve around the content of an MBA, but in the quality skills that we learn outside the curriculum – relationships, leadership, responsibility, goal setting, integrity and being passionate about our work.

The legacy of lifelong education
As in my day, these lessons remain and I am thankful for them. Yet, school also continues to churn out children equipped for the Industrial era. It creates a middle class that fail to distinguish between good and bad debt, who work the 9-5 because that’s all they know.

In the 80s I was one of the first privileged few to dry run the new “career software” that the school had purchased. After diligently punching in my multiple choice answers about whether or not I liked working in teams, enjoyed sports etc, the computer spat out its indictment a week later by post. Under “category A recommendations” (for which I was best suited), the computer suggested…. nothing. Under “B”, there was only one option “Inland Revenue”. QED