Untaught

I had breakfast with a friend the other day. We talked about the how we are not taught how to do a lot of things to the level we would have liked. One thing being reading. As in we aren’t taught to enjoy doing it in a manner that scales to adulthood. We get taught the basics and teachers try to do the best they can but their effort usually falls flat. Basic skills other than reading would be writing and speaking. A lot more goes into their development than we care to admit.

            Some teachers know the truth. I spoke with a teacher recently and she admitted than schools don’t really help most kids or at least are not designed to. There are competing interests such as government regulation which emphasizes how kids should be taught through curriculum and standardized tests. There are parents who want to see there kids surpass arbitrary benchmarks. There are teachers who want to know they are doing a good job. The system feeds itself. And so most students don’t get the time or the resources needed to truly develop skillsets that last a lifetime in the timeframe they are in school for.

            I repeatedly come back to education as a concerning topic. Not because of its importance, but because of the pleasure one can get from it. Reading can be enjoyable, but if we keep reading things that we inherently dislike or for some extrinsic purpose such as a writing assignment we lose out on finding that joy. That is the skill that takes time to develop. That is the thing that makes the basics sustainable over a lifetime. Without it, we just end up loathing the skill. And the skill devolves into a task that we push through. Life turns into a chore.

            I see the importance of education being stressed. But much like a navigator without a compass I felt lost. Going through the social dynamics of high school, to climb to college, to get a job. The blueprint was there, but a lot of small details were overlooked. As an adult, I am getting a better understanding of the place each skill holds in life. I see the anxiety of not being able to do it, whatever “it” may be.

            Maybe it is too much to claim that schools don’t teach us. I think they are trying. I just don’t think they ever had a real shot at helping kids who wanted to learn. And then those kids give up and become like everyone else. Eventually I learned to stop putting so much faith into school. I reclaimed some of it by putting it into myself. But that took time. A lot of pitfalls to realize the value of the basics and ways that worked for me. That might be the real goal: Finding ways that work for each person.