The Shortcomings of my Education
Whenever I did something seemingly impolite as a child, my mum would say to me,
“Don’t they teach you manners at school?”
and I would get the same from teachers at school,
“Don’t your parents teach you how to behave?”
Both blaming each other for not giving me the expected social etiquette. So between schooling and parenting, a lot of things I was supposed-to-know were falling between the cracks, and not just manners.
When I left school at 18, I wasn’t exactly fully equipped to deal with modern life, yet thrust into it, now an ‘adult’. I entered my adulthood chapter bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, HELLO WORLD, here I come. You have to be confident of whatever you know, at the age you are at the time, and run with that. And I look back at my 18 year old self and think hmmmm, you actually didn’t really have a clue about the world, yet you had a CV of excellent grades — the certification to say you understood all the topics that the institution deemed important to learn about. The passport for your future. Someone decided that the most important things were Maths, English, Science, and perhaps History and Geography. Oh and possibly one other language, however we speak English so we could leave everyone else to speak that. The creative subjects, Art, Drama and Music, were just the mess-around lessons really, I enjoyed them far too much for them to be respected, I didn’t take them seriously like other proper subjects. And P.E. was just pure fun, our playtime, not really ‘important’.
My schedule for 14 years of my life was around deep diving into certain topics which someone else decided for me. I didn’t value the power of games, embodiment and teamwork dynamics in P.E. and the creative subjects I didn’t feel were going to help me get a job so I treated them lightly. School is preparing me for the world of serious important work, the 9–5 model of sitting down and using your head, following the instructions, like in office jobs. Exams were a way of determining how much you were answering the questions exactly as you were supposed to.
How good would it be to go back to “school” for a few years, spend your days learning about what it is to be a human having this human experience, create your own curriculum, and go explore loads of other subjects, things you totally missed out first time round. There are infinite things to learn, what it boils down to is what do we need to learn to add value to the world as it is right now? What does the world need from us humans? What lessons did I not get at school which would have equipped me better for the world? I have come up with a few topics:
Connection to the natural world & Observational lessons
Instead of sitting inside in a classroom and looking at a blackboard for our learning, or heads burrowed into books, we could go out into nature and observe the natural world around us as a point of discovery. Tune into it and let it put on a show for us: look at the sky, look at the ground, the trees, observe how the sun moves throughout the day, feel the wind on our skin and take notes of the weather. Every day make observations of what you see and how it changes day by day, season by season, which flowers and plants are out. Notice things. Instead of naming all the parts of a leaf, just look at a leaf in wonder, and figure out why it was formed in that way, from examining it yourself. Instead of learning about geography from books, look at the formation of the world around us. At night, lie down on the ground and look up at the stars. Hey, I could even figure out how to make my own makeshift telescope and try to take a closer look at the cosmos out there.
Would love to be more connected to land, living plants, trees, the air, tune into the wisdom of the natural world. I think this is a big journey, to become more of a wild human. Also to go back to viewing the world through the lens of a scientist, making discoveries from your own observations rather than accepting existing theories already made and written down in textbooks.
Growing our own Food & Foraging
Our ancestors were in tune with the land, as they lived off the land and spent a lot of time being immersed in it. I was definitely not growing up — my food came from supermarkets, all packaged up in plastic. In order to survive we need to eat, so what a wonderful thing to figure out how to grow it ourselves? Would help us go to ‘zero waste’, no carbon footprint from the produce travelling any distance. And you’d be eating organic, delicious food. My gardening adventures have filled me with so much glee, watching the seed turn into a seedling, turn into a plant and then start producing edibles — such a miracle. If you put love into the growing of your vegetables, then you get to eat up that love, home grown produce is so delicious.
I’ve done a couple of foraging workshops, and was so fascinated with how much wild food grows for us to simply take — blackberries, wild garlic and mint, I’ve even gone picking nettles for nettle soup (with gloves on!) yet there is so much more to learn about foraging. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we let our world go a bit more wild and our land more unmanicured, and we could pick food when we went on walks?
I think connecting to food is fundamental to being a human. And to go back to its source is crucial in this.
Relating to others
Why were there no lessons at school on how to navigate relationships? We all need to live together on this planet peacefully, share together and work together. Our relationships are our greatest source of happiness, and also can be our greatest source of woe — so why don’t we place incredible importance on cultivating healthy and nourishing relationships at school?
Maybe we could prevent wars and navigate conflicts more smoothly with some awareness in how to form good relationships from an early age. We could help families stay together, love and support each other better. We’d all be better off if we could understand, accept and listen to one another.
I would suggest relationship lessons as important as Maths & English. Being able to express our needs, boundaries, desires and ideas effectively, and engage & communcate with others, surely is more important than algebra?
Emotional education
I think this exists in schools now, but not when I was there! How to identify your emotions and feelings, describe them, share them, tune into them. God forbid, being able to express our true emotions and feel safe to do so?! Also tools in being able to navigate your inner landscape and figure out what is going on within your mind — this does not need to start in adulthood for those interested in ‘self-development’, I kinda think everyone needs to do some self-reflection. And not from the angle of reflecting on your last quarterly performance for your work appraisal, but from all aspects of your life.
Also guidance in living with gratitude, empathy and kindness. It is like a muscle that needs to be practised, and for a teacher to help you work it. If we practised gratitude at school, we would be much happier. If we had practiced putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, we would be more accepting and kind to others, which would also make us better citizens of the world. I know I was lacking in empathy when I was a child, more driven by reaching my own achievements.
Philosophy
I know this subject could be taken at some schools, but I wasn’t offered this at mine and would have LOVED to have deep dived into this. What is life all about?! Who am I? Why are we here? Where are we going? What, who, why, where… WHHHHHHAAAATTTT IS GOING ON?!!!
When I discovered The School of Life videos on YouTube, I was hooked. Alain de Botton, thank you for educating me! Philosophy shouldn’t be only for academics with grey hair who pontificate in armchairs, it needs to be for the masses.
Improvisation
I learnt to play flute and could play from sheet music, however I was unable to improvise a tune on the spot, as I never was encouraged to do so. At school I was excellent at absorbing lots of information and regurgitating it. But could I fuse ideas together and come up with new concepts on the spot? Not really.
In life we are constantly improvising from each moment to the next. Improv comedy workshops have been so powerful in showing me how to respond to others, think in the moment, and own whatever comes through you. More education in improvising in general, would be ace! Stop following recipes, make up your own meals by experimenting and figuring out what goes well with what. Stop going to dance classes to pick up steps and choreography, and just dance freely. Have the courage to try things out, exercise your creative muscles and become confident in your own abilities to make things.
Self-care
You can’t help others or be in service to the world if you are not OK yourself. Instead of getting ill, reaching burnout, falling into a fit of depression or reaching a crisis point in your life from over-working, trying to do far too much in achieving your external goals, why did teachers not point out that the no.1 most important thing to focus on is your own self-care? Proper diet, regular exercise, time for play, social time, having self-compassion, regular good quality sleep.
I kinda think we are bombarded by negative news stories, we are living in critical times and are uncertain of the future. In order to be able to cope with all this, we need to become mentally strong. Through various techniques which could have been taught at schools, I would loved to have gone to regular lessons in the numerous ways you can look after yourself. Make sure you are looking after your physical, emotional and mental health.
Financial Education
When I was at school, there was a lot of focus on preparing ourselves for the world of work by getting our passport, which is the list of good grades. However, the point of work is to errr… make money right? But at no point did we get taught about money: how to make it (apart from in a salaried job as a ‘professional’), save it, invest it and spend it consciously. As much as I don’t want my entire existence to be based purely on the pursuit of making money and holding on to it, and would want say, love, to be the true currency, unfortunately it really is the substance holding our world together. Having a knowledge of how money works can drastically improve your life, and being really disconnected to it can be disastrous to your life and you could get into real difficulties.
More education in money not only would personally help us as individuals, but young minds could learn about it and challenge the flow of it at collective levels, so that it is working in our favour as a human race, rather than causing competition, selfishness, hoarding and bad practices that makes our world suffer from environmental and social perspectives.
Embodiment & Kinesthetic learning
We live in a disembodied world. We think we can solve all our problems by using our heads, and our body is simply a taxi for our brains, transporting us around. Yet our body carries so much wisdom, and there is much to be explored in the mind-body connection.
I’d love schools to bring the body back into teaching. I realised in my adult life that I am a kinesthetic learner. Many concepts I had read about in books I had intellectually grasped, but it hadn’t truly clicked properly. I have been lucky to stumble across incredible teachers who use movement to educate, and I have engaged with subjects on a much deeper level by using my body to absorb the information. I think it is because you FEEL in your body, you THINK with your mind. One example of this was when we were doing a workshop on social justice and we had to embody injustices e.g. the glass ceiling for women — I put my hands under the imaginary glass ceiling and felt how unfair it was. I read about feminism and sexism and got the concept, but this embodiment was the strongest I felt connected to it. I felt waves of anger, sadness and frustration in my body about all the injustices we navigated through movements.
I remember learning about the 2nd World War in History and having to cram in the facts for the exam about how Hitler came to power, and the dates of when key political things happed, not really grasping the atrocities of the whole thing. There was a complete disconnect with my heart. To drop into our hearts needs a new angle for teaching, away from blackboards and textbooks, and into embodied learning.
Sexuality
Ok so Sex Ed as we all know was really bad at school.
I was able to label all the parts of the anatomy and get 10/10 in a test (woohoo!), but did I actually know what sex was about? I am half way through my life and still learning about it. And quite probably, sex (combined with love even more so), is the most incredible thing we can experience as humans. And most of us probably have a warped relationship to our own sexuality, with not many places and people to explore the truth of our sexuality safely with. I wish as a teenager I was taught about how to give and receive touch, how to be empowered to ask for what you want and what you don’t want, about how sex is really for pleasure, it is meant to be enjoyed and how to navigate your sexual energy safely. We could have done practical lessons in consent and become empowered to say yes and no. Perhaps so many issues in the world are due to us acting out because of our disconnect with our own sexuality. I wonder if we could fix this, we could fix a lot of the world’s problems? I think I will write an entire blog about how we could help teenagers learn about sexuality… I think this was the biggest let down of school. We were left to learn about it from toxic sources.
