What Happens When a Kid Leaves Traditional Education

Anxiety, depression, and boredom have all found their ways into classrooms and lecture halls of today’s schools and colleges, all thanks to the rigid Traditional Education that the society has imposed on students and kids. At the age of three, a child is already being exposed to the rigors of active learning, which almost always forbids innovation, curiosity, and mistakes from the child.

It seems that Traditional education, as it currently stands, claims a monopoly of learning. As such, anyone that hasn’t gone to school or who did not graduate with good grades is deemed at best, a second-class citizen. Teachers give instructions, state formulas, rehearse poems, and expect kids to know and reproduce them in exams. Any kids’ attempt to deviate or introduce something not taught in class is punished by low grades or scores.

The result of this unwritten reality is people becoming educated without actually learning. Little children, from their teenage years, have learned to read, not so much for the learning it is said to impart, but to avoid going home with a poor score sheet. Many college students have become a regular visitor to school counselors because of the needless competition that traditional education champions.

Rather than celebrate individuals’ dynamism, traditional education creates a dichotomy by its system of grading. It sets kids and students into castes where, if nothing is done swiftly to correct the error, these students may forever live to define themselves by their grades and academic attainments.

The implication is that kids who cannot cope with traditional educational subjects are sidelined from taking active roles in society. This, Studyhippo believes, is not the best. Education should be fun and less stressful. The kindergarten approach, where kids play-learn, should be adopted to give them the opportunity to participate in real life situations in the future.

Some have feared that deviating from the status quo may water down the learning process. But this is not true. Kids who learn as they play learn better and eventually contribute more to society than their counterparts made to endure lots of assignments and notes in school. Based on recent findings, if kids leave traditional education, the following benefits can accompany it.

1. Learning Becomes Less Stressful

It is not uncommon to see students in colleges and high schools tearing up under the weight of enormous classes and assignments they have to meet up with. The stress is mostly attributable to the fact that traditional education gives little or no margin for error.

A mistake by a student in following a rule or reproducing a material as expected can spell doom to their academic career. No wonder one Marc Brackett recent survey of twenty-two thousand students in high schools revealed students complaining of feeling intense stress 80% of their time. The current traditional educational system may love this feeling, but it is certainly not the best.

2. More Motivation Leading to Greater Output

The prevailing argument before now is that students with straight As from front line colleges are the ones that often become society’s problem solvers. Maybe there was a time when this was true. But the recent body language of big companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs is not disposed to this opinion.

Google has specifically come out to declare that it does not find much correlation between impressive GPAs or brilliant test results and employees’ ability to thrive in the marketplace. Invariably, what this means is that using traditional education as the sole means of hiring people can be counterproductive.

In fact, in Gold Sachs’ view, that a candidate has received an education categorized as top quality by traditional educational standard does not always translate to such candidates being best fits for the job. Deloitte has even stopped hiring based on degrees, even for some of its top-ranked professional positions.

These are top players in the business world already picking holes in the traditional educational approach. This is because the system does little to motivate the students. And motivation is key to a reasonable output. Success in college can only translate to success in the business world when learning is fun, and students are not made to see it as a burden they are doing everything to get out of.

This position is corroborated by one high school poll by Gallup where it was uncovered that students’ sense of a bright future ahead is the leading basis for determining a college’s success. It does mean that an educational effort that leaves students depressed, frustrated, and hopeless cannot produce the kind of output that society expects.

3. Learning will be Less Expensive

Traditional education is becoming more and more expensive by the year. In the US alone, CNBC reports that students owe a whopping $1.5 trillion in debt. On average, 1 out of every 4 American college students would have owed at least $37,000 upon their graduation. The thought of having to repay such a huge amount that is enough to start a small business or get a new ride and home is enough to cause despair.

While learning has never been cheap, it has also never been this expensive. Traditional education has monetized even services that students if allowed to enjoy themselves while learning, can manually produce. So, rather than graduating to go do exploits, students feel miserable trying to pay up their debts.

Conclusion

Traditional education is not altogether bad; at least it served us well years and a couple of centuries back. But now that times are changing, it is important to review the system. The traditional subjects can still be learned but with a bit less emphasis on grades serving a yardstick for quantifying post-graduation success.

Learning should be infused into education so that kids and students find the process enjoyable. This can be achieved when there is little or nothing to put students in an unwarranted pensive mood. It is possible in an environment where students can score low grades, make mistakes and not get defined by it, or go against norms and get punished.

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