Education: A Missed Opportunity

I had lived the first 18 years of my life in Indonesia and I had attended lots of classes in my schooling that only taught me to memorize information.

Take Physical Education as an example: Yes, it gets us to stay active and have some fun at the same time. But what was delivered in the theoretical side (classroom education) of it was completely useless. I remember being taught and having to memorize information such as “Who is the inventor of the game of basketball?”, or “What are the dimensions of the tennis court”. This was a short-sighted education. It follows a text book that is purely informational, but it wasn’t used properly to challenge the real thinking.

What you can learn from the game IS the important thing, and it is the interesting part.
How to play the game is not as interesting as how to build a strong team, understanding the meaning of working in a team, the sportsmanlike conduct, maximizing strengths while minimizing weaknesses, strategizing for example. The initial only explains what can be read in about 10-15 minutes, while the latter can benefit the person throughout a lifetime.

As Sir Ken Robinson once indicated, schools are made to produce people to be placed in factories. They also reduce the genius potentials of kids tremendously because they are not promoting thinking, but focusing on the menial things. I’d like to think that proper education actually makes us become better thinkers thus helping us make better judgements.

I reflected this to the discussions that I had with my documentary subjects and each one supports this idea. Anton Ismael had it right when he learns from observation and comparing one thing from another to overcome his deficiency in reading capabilities, Nancy Dinar had it right when she created a school for the gifted and understood that the method of learning needs to have more than just memorization exercises, Kenton Nelson had it right when he said not to create art for the sake of money, but for the satisfaction of the soul as an extension of your constant pursuit of perfecting your craft, Jim Heimann utilizing his passions to gather old paper ephemera to preserve history. The list goes on and on. In fact, there are so many people that we can learn from but only if we are open to it. Opening to learning new things require us to reset our way of thinking.

School is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact when the teaching process is improved while promoting thinking and creativity, I think it can be amazing.

We should always attempt to see the bigger picture, always.