Returning to the theme of the treachery of childhood, two things that I feel is sorely missing from a modern education is training in how to be successful and how to deal with everyday life.
In the traditional education of ages past, most children who were being educated (this wasn't every child back in those days) eventually moved from school into an apprenticeship that equipped them with a skill that was expected to provide them with their livelihood for the rest of their lives, and provide them with plenty of opportunity for advancement if they would apply themselves to it. The apprentice trained to eventually become a master in his own right, and to eventually have his own practice, either taking over his master's shop eventually or hanging out his own shingle. It was understood that he was working for the master with the intention of eventually setting himself up, and that while he served the master, he was building his own skills and reputation that would eventually serve him well in his own work, not simply advance the shop where he worked and allow him little opportunities for advancement as the shop grew (though never quite as large of a percentage of the advancement as would be received by the master). In this world, the path of education gave someone a very straightforward path to success. All a child, youth, and young man from an educated background had to do to find himself well on the path towards success was apply himself diligently to everything that his hand found to do. Of course, peasants and others of the uneducated classes faced a much harsher condition. Whereas, the people who followed the paths of education were practically guaranteed to meet success if they followed the path set in front of them, peasants were given no opportunity for significant advancement no matter what they did. They were locked in their condition. Still, there was a straightforward path for every child to take in his occupation. In all most all cases he could do no better than accepting his lot in life and making the most of it; those who grew discontent and tried to take up another life elsewhere tended to live short lives ended by cholera. (This is only a slight exaggeration... in the early days of the industrial revolution, the life expectancy of a peasant who moved to the city was only about five years past when he arrived. Whatever promise urban life seemed to hold at this time, it was a false promise. Those who stayed in the country did far better for themselves than those who left.) While the young peasant had no real chance of meeting great success in this world, he had a very clear path for maximizing his success, and it was quite simply to continue to do what he had been brought up to do, to work hard at it, and do it well.
And then the world changed. In many ways, it changed for the better. Producing things became much more efficient and cost-effective. No longer did most of the world's civilized population have to work in the fields to produce the food required to sustain the population. No longer did every piece of furniture need to be slowly assembled by a master craftsman by hand. The primary resource constraint limiting the amount that people could accomplish ceased to be human labor and instead became the raw natural productivity of the land. One person could easily tend the land that used to require hundreds of laborers, but that land still produced only as much as it was able to produce. In this world people were no longer looking to find assistants. They had plenty to choose from, for many people were now beginning to instead search for work. Instead of taking any capable boy who was interested in learning the trade and one or two connections to establish his reputation, those who had their own shop now had the luxury of searching for whatever assistants brought with them the most qualifications. Once these assistants were hired, they were no longer apprentices, being prepared to eventually succeed in their own right. They were simply workers, hired and expected to promote the advancement of the shop, and for motivation, they would be rewarded for their work with some small amount of the advancement that the shop received, provided they contributed more than their fellow-workers. In the resulting world there's no clear path to success. There's a huge disconnection between what you do in school and what you do in life after finishing your education, and simply doing what you're trained to do and excelling at everything your hand finds to do, is no longer anything close to a guaranteed path towards what feels like success. Someone who does this will still be extremely likely to find himself well-paid a few years into his career, but at an enormous sacrifice. To follow this path is to surrender the potential for mastery and to surrender with it the ability for your own individual skills and contribution to have much impact on how well you do in life. Your success is much more tightly tied to the success of your company than it is to your ability in your trade. People notice this almost immediately, and many begin jumping between companies in search of company that will achieve success and bring them up with it in its rising swell. But doing this relies on obtaining all sorts of skills that you've never been trained to have and that the people you work with and work for don't want you to obtain. It's an alienating experience. There's an enormous disconnect between what you do to succeed in your work and what you do to succeed in your life, and all of the rules that you've developed throughout your childhood based on the way advancement and recognition worked in your education have conditioned you to choose the things that help you succeed in your immediate work and sacrifice the things that will help you succeed in your life.
Something needs to be done about this. We've inherited an educational system from a time when education was meant to prepare people to enter a world of apprenticeship followed by eventually becoming a master of his own trade, but we no longer have a world in which this educational system makes any sense. Being a good student doesn't prepare people for life after education, and neither does being a bad student. There's no natural progression from developing skills to using them. Instead, people spend part of their lives developing skills and knowledge only to be thrust into a world in which almost all of their skills and knowledge are completely irrelevant, and have to learn from scratch how to function in this setting that is utterly unlike anything they have ever prepared for. My childhood wasn't entirely spent in education. There were also the summers, and I spent some of those summers in summer jobs, but if anything, summer jobs, at least of the variety I had, do nothing to prepare you for the world of work after college, and if anything are even less compatible with it than my education was. The sorts of things someone learns in three months of doing manual labor and the skills one develops in that situation just don't map over into the kinds of things people need to do in an office. The sorts of things kids do in sports and other social activities, don't map over into the kinds of things that are done to establish professional relationships. The whole of childhood, at least the whole of my childhood, was spent preparing me to function in a fictitious world that simply doesn't exist. I haven't figured out exactly what I need to do to function well in the world that does exist, yet, but I have learned that the lessons of my childhood have not done much to prepare me for figuring that out. All it did to help me was give me some skills and knowledge that are useful for impressing people who I sometimes need to impress, but ultimately prove useless for facing the sorts of problems that I face in the real world.
I'd planned to be more specific with examples from my own life, but I can't share them without becoming angry, so I won't.
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