Being Good at School, Today’s Most Overrated Skill
Imagine for a moment you were looking to hire someone for your business, and you ran across a resume that read something like this.
12 years experience in taking multiple-choice exams
8 years of compliance training in areas such as
Avoiding the use of practical resources like smartphones and calculators
Only speaking when spoken to
Extensive study of topics with no practical use in real life
Bladder control
Able to memorize 50% more facts in one cram session than my competitors
Improved ability to guess what the teacher wanted me to know in my exam by 200% over 3 years.
Best in class at note-taking during PowerPoint lectures
Can sit still in 50 min intervals without falling asleep for up to 7 hrs per day.
Highly proficient at texting in my lap without looking or getting caught
Able to spend 16 years learning things for reasons I can’t explain.
Most of us would look at such a resume and scoff at this person’s qualifications, and yet, these are the skills most heavily reinforced and highly valued in our school system today.
We push students to quietly spend long hours sitting in rows of desks taking notes, and “drinking it in.” Then, when we use auto-graded multiple-choice exams to assess what they’ve learned, we are shocked that the content they were “taught” at the beginning of the year “just didn’t sink in.”
We have become so obsessed with standardized tests, GPAs, and college applications, that we have lost sight of what learning even means. The pong standing mantra of “If it’s not measurable, it’s not important” has turned our schools into factories of compliance rather than creativity.
I openly admit these ideas are not my own. Others, far more enlightened than I am, have been expressing these ideas for decades. Sir Ken Robinson, Ted Dintersmith, Salman Kahn, Larry Rosenstock, and many others came up with these ideas long before I did. I give them credit for practically everything I say, but I want to add my voice to the list of those who are saying it.
“The problem with spending so much time, energy, and money on becoming good at school is that this skill is rarely transferable into anything done after you leave school. “
If we didn’t know how to resolve this challenge, it would be acceptable to continue down this path merely doing the best we can with what we do know. However, the truth is we’ve had well-replicated research dating back to the mid-1960s describing precisely what to do and how to do it. Through this research and decades of documented best practices in learning and teaching, we know how to create optimal learning experiences, and yet to this day, we continue to depend on teaching strategies invented well over 100 years ago.
Here is my first point with all this.
Regardless of your level of intelligence, in today’s learning landscape, if you cannot master the skill of the multiple-choice exam, you will do poorly in school. If you aren’t proficient in memorizing large amounts of decontextualized and often impractical or useless information, you will do poorly in school. If you cannot or will not develop a talent for guessing exactly what the teacher is “looking for” in any given situation, you will do poorly in school. And from there, the default assumption is that if you do poorly in school, you do poorly in life.
The truth is, doing well in school is a specific skill, and many students spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and money learning how to master this skill for three primary reasons:
Their parents tell them it’s the only way to get a job.
Their teachers tell them it’s the only way to get into college.
Society tells them it’s the only way to prove you are worth something.
Here’s my second and more important point.
The problem with spending so much time, energy, and money on becoming good at school is that this skill is rarely transferable into anything done after you leave school.
The result? A growing group of students leave academia feeling good about their diploma and class ranking, only to discover the skills they have sharpened for so long have no place in the workforce or life in general.
Imagine how disheartening this is. You are a recent graduate who has just incurred $50,000 in student loan debt. You have done everything you were told to do since kindergarten. Now you are competing with thousands of other recent graduates for low paying jobs because you’ve come to realize that despite 17 years of education, entry-level jobs are still the only ones you are qualified to fill.
I’ll bet you don’t have to imagine very hard because chances are good either you or someone you know, is in this exact situation. COVID created a crater of unemployment in our economy. Still, underemployment has been a chronic problem in this country for far longer than the pandemic has been around, and at a time when college graduates are more common than ever.
Students and parents are not the only ones frustrated by this dilemma. Talk to employers from any major industry, and they will tell you they cannot find qualified people to fill their most innovative and in-demand positions. The evidence that this challenge runs both directions is evident in the efforts companies are making in solving this problem on their own. Knowing they cannot rely on the mainstream approach to education, they have resorted to creating and soliciting learning pathways that entirely circumvent college.
Google just recently announced one such program. Read more about it here. They have created an entire curriculum that provides a shortcut to getting noticed in their hiring process. Unsurprisingly they don’t care about your GPA, SAT, ACT, GRE, MAT, or any other letters you can string together. What do they care about? Reall skills that are used in the everyday workforce at Google. IBM, Apple, and Amazon are all doing the same thing. They need people now, and they can’t wait for slow, ineffective pathways of more traditional methods to catch up.