In my childhood, they tried to jam a lot of stuff in my head. Not just mine, I mean the situation around state education or educating children (I even want to say young people) in general. I don’t think, that my particular case stands out in any intriguing way, for good or bad. But it will focus on my experience, well, because I don’t have any other.
Yeah, lots of stuff: history, literature, maths, Fundamentals of Safety of Life Activity (a subject taught in many Russian schools that has nothing to do with what is suggested by its name), economy, biology, physics, geography, sports education, etc. Sounds cool right? Kids from those schools are probably the smartest people on Earth. How much of it do you think I remember? A vanishing amount! I can speak two languages and do some maths. Should the credits be given to the school? Some credits, for sure, the school did deserve a little. The rest should be given to other activities and entities. Preparing for the university takes a lion’s share, working with great and smart people gets a lot, another huge bite goes to getting ready to move to another country.
The education I got was a base that opened the doors to me that led to many other doors (a good place for a picture of a tree path), which I’m grateful for, but that does not make it good or effective or optimal or even enjoyable. We (I probably shouldn’t project my experience to others and just say “I”) went to school to be loaded with facts and build some hard skills. To be fair, there were indeed several disciplines that helped develop general thinking meta-skills, and for that, I need to cut them some slack. But mostly the focus was on hard skills, memorizing facts, following routines, and filling our school diaries. It never made sense to me. Why are we learning these things? What’s next? What is the big idea? It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t meaningful.
I don’t want to make this post a rant about the state education or a complaint about “unjust” and “wrong” things in my junior years; I’m only trying to let the reader feel this sense of directionlessness and pointlessness to some extent that I associate with my school years.
I am a grown-up now, and I am living that life that the school and parents supposedly should’ve prepared me for. Living it, facing external and surprisingly internal challenges and obstacles, playing the game itself when the tutorial is over, I came to realize that there were certain gaps in my toolbox of skills, mental models, and thinking habits, that I’m working to fill now. I must admit, that sometimes it is the hard skill or factual knowledge that I miss, but mostly it is one of those sacred mysteries regarding how-to-be-human-stuff: meta-skills, mental models, philosophy training, and having lived certain experiences
So many of those things and facts taught at school have faded into the ether, use it or lose it, remember? While the skill of finding the information that I got from uni made it through the years. This one has a nice property of being generic, which means, it can be applied in many different contexts.
Another meta-skill that is cultivated in maths, computer science, and literature classes is reasoning. From this follows that, if A and B, then C. The character lived in such times, was of such and such origin and dreamed about so-and-so, and therefore she acted, said, thought or felt the way she did.
Fast-forward to my big boy times, I wish I was taught such simple and somehow hard-to-grasp ideas as patience, playing the long game, planning, thinking of mistakes as just experience, relations with ego and fear, and many other things in a similar vein, during my school years. It would be great if teachers and/or parents would talk to me about philosophy, stoicism, emotional intelligence, the deceptive and undermining nature of perfectionism, how to be disciplined but not hard on yourself, etc. These things cannot be learnt just by repeatedly listening to them or even saying them out loud. These are the things that we absorb bit by bit by living through certain situations and reflecting on them. Building these qualities and skills needs to be a gradual process of setting up and sticking to a framework that consists of the practical aspect of dealing with challenges and the mental work of making sense of what happened to ruminate on it. An important part of this framework is a mentor. This role might be filled by one of the parents, but it does not have to be them. The mentor’s role is to help his student make sense of their experience, stay positive, develop a good and healthy attitude, learn patience, and build courage to experiment with approaches.
Learning this framework is, in essence, similar to playing a computer game where a hero goes to the wild looking for adventures, experience, and challenges. Then that hero returns to the village he started from to heal his wounds, convert gained experience into skills and abilities, get better equip and talk to the wise people of the town to decide on his new quest.
If I were to play my life from my childhood again, I would focus a lot on saying “yes” to as many challenges as I can, studying stoicism and Zen. I would get my hands dirty doing a lot of stuff myself: apps, posts, cooking, drawing, etc. I would work to develop a mindset of an opportunist and active creator, a mindset, that implies my responsibility for the course of my life, not waiting for things to happen, but building the foundation that increases the probability of a favourable event to come. Also, I would focus a hell lot more on people skills and emotional intelligence. And, I would learn to play the long game, to cope with things going slow or even not going my way, and to tell if I am moving in the right direction.
I believe these skills and ways of thinking are profoundly important for success in life, regardless of a particular definition of success. I say so, because whatever your goals are, be it a multimillion-dollar business, becoming a best-selling author, creating a happy family, raising mentally and physically healthy kids, you name it, the tools that I listed above will be a great help on that path. Two key ideas that unite all the precious skills and qualities listed above are resilience and vision. Those are the properties you want when you set your foot on any journey. Vision helps you keep the destination in your head to be on track and decide the direction, while resilience enables you to deal with whatever life sends your way the next moment and overcome turbulence.
Please teach your kids that, please teach yourself that. And I will do my best to learn it too, step by step, book by book, project by project.
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