The education system is outdated

First of all, it took me more than 12 years and 2 master degrees to realize that the education system sucks, and the only thing that it offers is a piece of paper with a promise of a better future.

That’s the biggest lie that someone told me up until now. I can’t really believe how brainwashed my parents and the masses are for believing that schools and colleges will somehow give you the necessary knowledge for future success and I can’t believe that we wasted so much money, time and energy in this lie when we could use it for something better.

Colleges preach limitation and competition, and they don’t really care that much for our future. Just imagine that it’s very hard to get a 10k business loan at a young age but not a 50k student loan.

Luckily I didn’t get a loan because my father was willing to pay for the damage, but he payed over 150k for me and my sisters to go to university and I feel sorry for him for not knowing any better.

I also feel anger for the education system for not only brainwashing and killing our dreams, but also brainwashing their employees (teachers) into making them believe that they know what they’re talking about.

How can a business professor teach business when they never started a business themselves? And why do they treat college students like they are in elementary school? We all have to remember the answers and not cheat by googling but what’s the point of memorizing something that you can find on google in a matter of seconds? That’s the whole point of technology anyway, to make our life better and easier, so why not take advantage of that innovation and start learning things that actually matter?

Colleges and schools in general preach limitation by teaching us how to play it safe and not take big risks, to settle for less and have the same average life like everyone else.

They teach kids how to think small instead of how to make this world a better place. They teach kids how to be followers instead of leaders, how to be employees instead of entrepreneurs, how to compete instead of cooperate and how to obey rules without questioning them.

Competition is the underline purpose of the education system. Times are changing and competition no longer works for many businesses, especially during these difficult times.

After reading many books from people with real experience in the business world, they say that to succeed as a business is to avoid competition as much as possible, but this is not what schools are teaching us.

From the very beginning they force us into competing for a better grade, for a better college, and then this goes on as a habit later in our life, competing for a better job, for a promotion, for a better car, for a bigger house, for a better future and this leads us into thinking that everything is scarce in this life and there is not enough for everyone.

They also kill our passions and dreams and instill in our minds the society’s standards, you know, being a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher or something that you really don’t want to be but “have” to in order to impress parents, society and have a stable and secure future.

There’s nothing wrong with these occupations if you really love them. We need these people, but the real problem is when you are doing it because your parents or teachers or society told you so. I can’t blame parents because most of them don’t know any better and they just want the best for their kids, but if kids don’t take responsibility for their life and ignore society’s standards, they will remain average, with an average job, average friends, average life and today we need visionaries and game changers more than ever before.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a normal quiet average life, but this world doesn’t need more average people. It needs more leaders and big thinkers. Big thinking is considered dangerous, unrealistic and delusional for the education system but in the end it’s those unrealistic people that do the biggest things.

Don’t rely on the education system to learn anything. You can learn anything you want and even more on Google, YouTube, books and online courses. These tools are really life-changing but most people use them only to entertain themselves. What 2020 has showed us is that having a degrees and PhDs doesn't really mean that someone’s smart.

The point of going to school is to get more money in the future if you think about it. You go to school to get “qualified” so you can get a good job with a good salary to support yourself and your family in the future. All of this is to get more money to feel more secure, and the only think that school doesn’t teach kids is how to earn money, how to invest money and how to manage money.

There are infinite ways to earn money today thanks to the internet, and you don’t even need a big capital or at some cases no capital at all to start. Some examples that I can give you is starting a YouTube channel and sharing your talents and knowledge to the world, or starting a blog on Medium, or writing a book and self-publishing it through Kindle Amazon, or starting a drop-shipping company, or building a newsletter, or freelancing and a lot of other ways that do not require any startup capital.

Schools don’t teach any of that and you lose the whole point of going to school. You go there to learn? You can learn anything online. That’s an exception for a few studies of course like law, medical studies, STEM studies or something that really requires academic knowledge, but if you pay so much money to study business, marketing, etc.? you are wasting your time and money.

Whenever I say to my dad that school doesn’t offer me anything and we could use the money to start a business, he always rolls his eyes. I don’t blame him because I know he doesn’t know any better. There was no internet back in his day, he didn’t have the access to the information that I have today and he is not really tech savvy, but many of my teachers think in the same way, and this is where I lose my patience.

They don’t even like when I question the purpose of going to school or the reason that we cannot use our phones to find an answer or their way of teaching. They don’t like people questioning a lot of things, they think they have all the answers. They kill creativity, dreams and big thinkers.

I won a competition in my university for the best entrepreneurial idea, and when I went to my “entrepreneurship” lecturer, I asked for guidance to make my idea a solid business. He rolled his eyes and told me this is not Silicon Valley and I am not Steve Jobs. This idea will not work anyway and be realistic and blah blah blah.

That’s the lecturer that “teaches” us entrepreneurship, yeah what an irony. He cut my wings, he told me after a couple of days of insisting, to come snap back to reality and stop dreaming so much. My dad told me the same thing.

Long story short, I was about to drop out and focus all of my time and energy into my idea, but the pandemic came, everything closed, and I just decided to stay there until everything came back to normal.

3 years passed, I got 2 master degrees, not because I needed to, but because I had nothing else to do with my time, and to make my dad happy. I am already working for 7 years in the hotel industry, but no one seems to care about my degrees. I have the same salary and position as people who didn’t study, “WTF am I doing here?” I thought, and I quit. I don’t know what my future will be and where my heart will lead me, but I decided never to have a normal 9-5 job again, where I have to wait till I’m 30ish for my degrees to count. Maybe I’ll build something on my own by then.

Bottom line is, don’t depend on schools to teach you something, or to make your future better. If you really want to learn something you can learn it for free thanks to the internet. Knowledge from people’s experience, books, biographies, online courses that get straight to the point.

I hope this post woke up something in you, gave you some direction, or offered any kind of value. If you think this post will help someone, share it.