Schools have forgotten rule number one — Ask your end-users
What’s the number one thing you want to do as a business? Most people’s answer to this question would be to please their customers.
If you’re a product owner developing an application, your number one source of information will be your users. For a recruiter, it will be the company for which they’re recruiting and for a store manager, it will be the customers coming to their boutique.
Then how come that for some sectors, this simple truth of listening to your end-user seems to have been lost?
Earlier this year I watched a rather intriguing YouTube clip, It was a video called: Six Problems With Our School System, produced by Next School and as you can guess, the video talked about why our current school systems aren’t consistent with how the world looks today. It highlighted a number of reasons including the fact that we currently discourage autonomy and creativity while encouraging the simple following of instructions. These are behaviors designed for the industrial age when following instructions was crucial and creative, out-of-the-box thinking considered a threat to efficiency. But how far does one get today if only following instructions? My personal opinion would be, not very far.
Arguing that one cannot evolve one’s personal strengths if not given room to do so. If not taught to think for oneself. I’m quite sure that this last point, would send the master of mental models Ray Dalio himself, off on a rant about how it is more important to teach someone how to think, than what. The reason I’m saying this is because today, schools operate by a system where information is communicated and expected to be remembered. Put in another way, in authentic learning. I don’t think I have to tell you how inefficient this method is. Simply try to remember the details of the last test you studied for.
By now I believe we’ve established that our current school system is displaying some rather significant flaws. Flaws that, if we want to prepare our kids for the world we live in, will have to be addressed. Going back to the business examples at the beginning of this article, my number one question is why schools aren’t asking their end-users how to improve?
Now if I was a principal of a school and I wanted to improve engagement, I’d run an engagement survey. Now when did you ever get to answer one of those as a student?
If I was a teacher and I wanted to improve remembrance, I’d hold a collaborative brainstorming session with my class. Now do tell, when did that last happen?
Schools, like many other governmental infrastructures, seem to have forgotten that at the core, they are organisations. Companies if you will. And like all companies, they have employees (teachers) and customers (students). Though being a governmental body has its perks in terms of stability, which one must agree is important in the name of education, there is a point when stability turns into stagnation. I believe that unfortunately, many schools have reached this point. The result?
Organisations that never change, are teaching our kids how to approach a world that changes every day
In short; We’re teaching our kids a fixed mindset when we should be teaching them a growth one!
For those of you who are not yet familiar with the concept of a growth mindset, I’m going to share this amazing TEDtalk by the very person who coined the term, Carol Dweck. That said, for the sake of this article, the short summary of the concept is to look at learning from a not yet perspective. A student didn’t perform as well as required, yet. A student couldn’t concentrate well, yet. A student didn’t feel accomplished, smart, yet.
Hopefully, you’re starting to get the point, which is that a growth mindset, transforms the meaning of effort and difficulty from something scary, into an opportunity. And isn’t that exactly what we want to teach our kids? That no matter the challenges they’ll face in life, each one of them will make them grow a little bit taller.
🍑 Peach out
