Education – Learning to learn vs learning to get a job.

Apologies again for last week, I’m having a crazy time at the moment and frankly I can NOT wait till my degree is OVER!! (That and Wednesday when the Leadership Tournament I’m organising is over!) Before I begin just a quick message for y’all: It seemed that the week before last my blog readership grew exponentially with relation to prior weeks, so thank you to those people that spent the time reading and commenting, a fair deal of interesting opinions were voiced. I do appreciate it. A few people even put the link up on their statuses for which I really want to thank you for! Please do continue to promote it to friends and family because that’s how most people come to know it exists. I won’t lie. It is a massive ego massage to check the stats and see hundreds of people reading weekly! Anyway, onwards with today’s post!

This week I haven’t really had a chance to sit down and actually mull something over in my mind, I’ve been so preoccupied with a variety of things going on in my life and when I do have a free minute I spend it asleep! So apologies if you think the topic isn’t as substantial as some of the prior ones. 

Now let’s get to it. Education. Many people these days are ambitious. They want to do big things and they envision that having a solid foundation (i.e. education) will get them there. Which in some cases works, but in many it strikes me as the wrong reason to learn. I’m one of those people who loves to learn for the sake of discovering something new and building on a talent. But our education system here in the UK channels us to get educated for a job. You learn because you want/need to pass an exam. For me, this concept seems really, really wrong. Yeah, there should be a way of testing your understanding but a mark on a piece of work you do over an hour (or a number of hours for coursework) does not demonstrate your actual capabilities. I think this is why I enjoyed school so much. Although there was emphasis on exams and blah I didn’t have to study (well study much) outside of school hours to get a pretty decent set of grades. It was enough for me to come in to lessons, listen, actively participate, and ultimately UNDERSTAND THE CONCEPT/S, thus allowing me to apply my knowledge and somehow that came across when I did my exams. 

In college and uni I discovered that simply paying attention in class was not enough to get you anywhere. You need to learn but you need to portray that you’ve learnt things in a certain way, almost show that you’ve done a fair deal more than expected. In order to get the good marks you had to consciously structure your answers in an almost calculated process, ticking things as you go. [e.g. Business: Definitions of key terms, advantages of technique one, disadvantages of technique one, advantages of technique two, disadvantages of technique two (iterate as appropriate to the number of marks available) before concluding which you think is most appropriate to the case study and justify) You were taught how to answer the question, think about it, how WRONG is that!? You should be taught the concept enabling you to apply the knowledge in an exam not working backwards by teaching you ‘this is what examiners look for.’ Technically this means that you can blag/wing an exam without actually knowing anything substantial but by knowing how to write an answer which doesn’t take a genius. That is the problem these days. How on earth are we ever going to achieve something when the basis of our lives, education, revolves around short cuts. Personally, I’d much rather spend a day learning a concept and actually getting it than an hour learning how to answer a question making it appear as though I know what I’m prattling on about. In school I was always the one nicking the fat-ass text books (which you weren't allowed to take home) which elaborated on theory and reading them then the condensed notes with key words emboldened and underlined! Maybe that makes me a geek. I don’t know. I ENJOY LEARNING. But I learn to learn, not to pass an exam. I DESPISE learning to pass an exam which is probably why I didn’t like college and I’m not the greatest fan of uni either. 

That said, is an education the basis for doing well?! Really, if there are such methods of gaining good grades without understanding then it means nothing. Take for example Science, how can an A* mean you understood concepts when actually all you did was regurgitate notes ensuring that you included the key words like photosynthesis, light, water, carbon dioxide, chlorophyll and energy without understanding what the stomata does. Maybe that’s a bad example but I hope you get the gist of it. Why on earth are we dumbing things down. Making things ‘bitesize’ developing a formula/strategy to pass exams… Surely, this devalues the whole education system. Look at people that got far in life such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson, they did it without a good education. I’m not saying don’t go to school or anything but it just goes to show education isn’t everything. 

Ultimately I don’t think the government are making life any easier for this major problem. Charging £9,000 for a degree is rather high. And now people would think twice about going to study a subject where the financial returns in a job aren’t high. People that come to uni for a job after they graduate will continue to do so, but people that come to uni to study English, History, etc because they genuinely enjoy it, which typically aren’t going to result in a large monthly pay packet will stop. And I fully understand why they’re in the position that they have to do so. I mean they were already subsidising education by two thirds, and we were taking that for granted now that they’ve taken it away. But it’s just making the problem worse. Not the financial problem but that of the reasons why people choose to study. Often I think going to university is a societal pressure. Almost as though you must go to uni to get a good job. FALSE. The number of graduates without a job is a scary figure. A degree isn’t all you need. You need a degree from an esteemed institute, you need extra-curriculars and you need to demonstrate passion.  

It’s all supply and demand, all my fellow economists will already know this. You have bad quality graduates: You raise the price, the demand will drop, this will mean that those people who go to university will decrease. Only dedicated and high calibre students will be able to get into university, the rest will not. Institutes which are lower on the ranking tables will close down because they will no longer have people applying and it will be financially unfeasible to continue running it. Therefore, students will compete fiercely for limited places in less unis. Survival of the fittest if you will. So smaller number of people with degrees but from more credible universities = restoring the quality of graduates. Even still, I firmly believe, a degree can only give you so much. You need experience in an array of things. Employers do not perceive a degree as a sufficient reason to hand out jobs. You need soft skills, creativity, ability to present, problem solving skills, all sorts of things that uni does not give you. I guess this is where extra curriculars come in. Well at least from my experience anyway. 

I’m going to leave you with something that I read, a really interesting report in my first semester this year by James Dyson who suggested ways to pave the way for Britain’s success. It boiled down to encouraging children from a young age to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects. We here in the UK have some of the top STEM subject universities in the world yet most of the people studying these subjects are from abroad… Every year the numbers of English students applying to study such subjects drops. Dyson proposed to create a culture where STEM subjects are respected, encouraging students to pursue these subjects, exploiting the knowledge we have, and financing/supporting high tech projects, companies and courses. If anyone is interested in reading the report, I do recommend it, drop me your email address, I have it saved on my PC and will send it your way. I quote: “4% of teenage girls want to be engineers, 14% want to be scientists, and 32% want to be models.” This makes me so sad.

Have a good week! Study hard! =P

-K