School Was Built To Kill Curiosity
A lot of people hate to learn and school is the root cause, ironically.
I remember learning about sequences and series in GCSE Maths and I was struggling to pick up one of the concepts, so I went home and my Dad and I found a method that solved the problem step by step. Suddenly I wasn’t confused anymore! The next day when I used the method at school my teacher told me no you’ve got to use the method I taught you. I told her that that method was confusing me whereas this new method made sense - but it didn’t matter to her.
The exams expected a particular type of method - not the one that walks you through the problem and allows you to understand why you got the answer but the shortcut method that skips steps.
This became a core memory for me.
It was the moment I realised school didn’t give a damn if you understood, only if you could memorise enough to answer the question.
Essays at school and uni followed the same structure. The instructions always told you exactly what they want to hear - you make sure to hit the criteria, you’ll get the grade. But if you let your curiosity out of bounds, explore a side not explicitly told to, they downgrade you for it.
Sterilised learnings, no exploration.
In the same lesson, you get given the problem and the solution.
The maths we learn in one lesson at school would have been explored by mathematicians for years. They were staring into the infinite and ethereal face of the mathematical universe and figured out each absolute truth till they formulated the solutions. A eureka moment every time.
We don’t see that moment.
It’s especially telling how many people slogged their way through maths despite how boring they made it, only to find 3Blue1Brown YouTube Channel and suddenly find concepts make sense and that there can be a spark of enjoyment for numbers. The YouTuber explains maths visually and makes it easy to follow each step - he takes you through each eureka moment.
School taught people to forget the beauty of EUREKA!
Babies don’t learn like this
Babies are constantly learning, they want to know about the world, they ask lots of questions, they figure things out. You can see when they discover their hands and stare at them like wow I can move my fingers around, this is so cool!
Then they learn to crawl and then walk and then run. They pick up an entire language from hearing people around them speak and point to objects! This is curiosity driven learning.
When you’re a student at school trying to learn a language, the focus is on grammar rules and memorisation. This is criteria driven learning - they forgot about the curiosity.
In the 1980s, a guy called Stephen Krashen, an American linguist, figured out that by listening to input slightly above your current level of understanding, you pick up language a lot faster.
From my own language learning in Thailand I’ve met people who take this method a lot further by putting off any writing or speaking and completely focusing on listening. The key is to not focus too hard on each word, instead picking up the associations to them.
From my own attempts at this I found it difficult not to fixate on a word. After a time, I noticed Thai words started to come to me more easily, but unlearning the school’s method of rote memorisation slowed progress.
It’s odd that this method gets left behind as soon as we enter the school system.
It’s rare to have a good teacher
As you move through school, you start to come to the realisation that the people teaching you tend to not be where they want to be in life, and a lot of kids pick up on that.
If you don't want their life, don't take their advice
— Alex Hormozi, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist
When Andrew Tate blew up online in 2024, students started to go into school and ask their teachers where’s your bugatti? This didn’t make the teachers very happy.
But it’s a question that reveals something deeper. I don’t want a bugatti, but why would I listen to a teacher who is not in any way the person I want to be?
Why pay attention to someone if they cannot explain a subject they were supposed to know inside out.
Later in my time at school, in sixth form, as I prepared for university, everyone had to meet with the careers advisor.
But this didn’t sit right with me. When I’m making an important decision like where to go after school, how can a career advisor, whose career has been a career advisor, advise me? It’s like saying you’ll be a life coach when you haven’t experienced life!
The best person to learn from is someone who is one step ahead of you
— Jack Tolley, entrepreneur, tech wizard and my husband :)
It is rare you’ll find a teacher who is passionate and will study their subject for fun, many only know as much as they’ve got to teach you (and seem to hate every step of the way).
It’s no wonder kids hate sitting in a classroom with these people.
Teach but forget to inspire
I have seen many a time when a person advised a friend or family member, but the friend or family member did not heed it. They will then say how frustrated they feel - they know their advice would work or be helpful, but they just refuse to listen!
The truth is, hearing words and feeling them are completely different. You could tell your friend, that guy is no good. You see it, they don’t. Eventually they get their heart broken and realise he was bad - but they only changed their ways once they felt the full consequences.
You could say you gotta work hard, but why would they unless they have felt how it’ll pay off and benefit them. When you are telling them, it just feels like pain right now for nothing.
You could tell your kid to stop smoking in the bathrooms, but right now they’re having a great time with their friends. They don’t see what you see in that moment, and they can’t feel the consequences.
People will only take action when they want to. It may be begrudgingly, painfully, or with full and happy motivation - but it’s only if they want it.
You’ve got to make them want it.
School doesn’t do this. In fact school just tells you to learn it - and that’s what makes students hate it.
Teach but forget how to get the kid to relate
If you cannot relate to a story in any way, how can you learn from it?
At school, the English syllabus is full of texts that are unconventional enough to read, let alone relate to.
When I was 14 I wasn’t experiencing an excruciating heartache. So why would I understand Romeo and Juliet?
I had never been so incredibly conflicted it was driving me insane, so why would I understand Hamlet?
I had never exercised a sort of ambition where I’d be unkind let alone violent. I had never felt such power that I’d fall weak to the pull of corruption. So why would I understand Macbeth?
Shakespeare’s works are incredible, but they were not written for teenagers.
Clockwork Orange deals with rape, insanity, murder and a repressive government.
Frankenstein deals with loneliness, obsession, parenthood, revenge and the corrupting power of knowledge.
A Streetcar Named Desire deals with betrayal, delusion, abuse, desire, alcoholism and social class.
Reading the words are not the same as feeling them.
Did I have any semblance of understanding when Blanche, from a Streetcar Named Desire, said:
Oh, in my youth I excited some admiration. But look at me now! [She smiles at him radiantly] Would you think it possible that I was once considered to be—attractive?
Or
Death is expensive, Miss Stella!
Or
BLANCHE: No, I – rarely touch it.
STANLEY: Some people rarely touch it, but it touches them often.
Or did I just add them to my essay because I knew talking about what she said would get me the grade?
Well, the success of my English exams was because I listened to how my teacher would talk and morphed my writing to sound exactly like her. Every paragraph was a great piece of waffle that shot me from Bs and Cs to A*s.
Moving into adulthood, teaching myself how to code, travelling across the world, getting married and building a business, I see more. Adulthood is filled with an incredible amount of ups and downs.
When I was a kid and I read Alfred, Lord Tennyson saying:
It is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
I thought it sounded beautiful, but I didn’t understand it. Now I do.
How the education system came about
But how did this rigid and frankly lifeless system come about?
Our current school system is a mash up between a foundation of questioning and debate from ancient Greece, bureaucratic utility from China and industrial efficiency from Europe.
In Ancient Greece, school was more informal and it cost money to send your kid there. The system was made up of individual teachers and tutors, with the teaching methods often using Socratic questioning and debate. Schools were usually small and focused on preparing students for life or the military, not standardised tests.
Back in the Sui Dynasty (581–618 CE) China started a system called Keju to select government officials based on merit and not birth. Candidates would start from 3-5 years old and have to memorise and interpret Confucian texts, around 400,000 characters and phrases.
The focus was rote memorisation, discipline and conformity - not curiosity.
During the 17th to 19th centuries, European Enlightenment thinkers observed Keju and began adopting this exam model for civil service recruitment.
As time went on and bureaucracy spread, and the Ancient Greek methods faded.
Later, the Prussian education model took the aims and ideas of Keju further. They needed obedient soldiers and factory workers so they designed a system to mass produce them.
But it wasn’t until the 19th century when the UK followed along. Up until then, many parents were paying for their kids to go to school. School was organised by religious groups, communities and charities.
Over the century, new Acts were passed that meant the state began gaining more and more control.
With one group in charge, lack of competition stopped the school system evolving - the best systems couldn’t shine and the worst weren’t discarded. They had managed to give free education for all, which is a great achievement, but this had a major downside: a loss of incentives for many. Money gives people a reason to care, and people never respect what is free.
What this has become
This has now morphed into a faceless system where teachers are paid poorly, and in my experience, in the UK, there’s no respect for them either. It’s rare you’ll find a teacher that is passionate about anything in life. There’s 30 to a class so no kid gets the full attention they need. When kids disrupt they are kept in the school with a warning, to the detriment of people who were actually trying. And they’ve managed to make it a system so boring that it’s sucked out all the fun from very rich and interesting subjects. Despite having years to practice the pace of learning, teachers never finish the syllabus before major exams. Just one memorable experience was when one of my classmates threw a chair across the room, I didn’t even realise till it flew over my head. Another guy ended up stabbing his “friend” in the knee with blunt scissors - his punishment? Go be at the school just across town. Another guy sexually assaulted a guy in the boys changing rooms. What do you think his punishment was? There were at least 3 pedophiles who got kicked out during my secondary and sixth form years. At one point, gypsies broke into the school field and set up camp for weeks. Bureaucracy meant they got to stay there for a while. The place you send your kids to be safe ended up with a massive group of incredibly inconsiderate people taking up the entire field with no police or any protection in between - no one was watching if they were getting into the school. Then for the cherry on top: if you take your kid out of school for those weeks, oh no now you’re in trouble.
Everyone’s complaining, everyone knows it’s a bit shit.
The system was designed to produce obedient workers, not curious thinkers - and it’s still running exactly as intended.
Taking notes is a waste of time, yet that’s all I did at school
When I hit university I was shocked to hear from some of the top students that they didn’t take any notes. I couldn’t compute it, I’d been taking notes as a core part of my studying since the beginning of school! Yet once I stopped, my grades got higher. I replaced all those hours of passive learning with answering question after question after question and it paid off.
I felt very frustrated! I had spent so many hours, for so many years, taking notes, only to now realise it was a waste of time! School told me notes were a great method of study and revision. In fact, the majority of my lessons consisted of the teacher having copied and pasted paragraphs of textbook notes onto a powerpoint slide with the class copying it down in silence.
Why is it that this passive learning is such a major part of school? Hours are filled up with a method that isn’t very effective. It leads people to take pride in making their notes beautiful rather than focusing on the content.
No wonder the syllabus never gets finished if we have to rewrite the textbook again and again.
Learning is awesome
In late 20s and 30s a lot of adults would have chosen a career path, become used to an income and mentally lock onto it. By 40s it’s unlikely they’ll take risks to change a situation they’re not happy about.
I saw people stop trying all the time at school, but it surprised me when I saw the same at uni. The professors didn’t care about the students and many students would play games on their laptops during lectures anyway, people would cheat on coursework, friends would complain about not understanding the material and then never practice it. Labs consisted of an entire term of 5 hour long sessions on a Friday to focus on an experiment that really could have been done in one afternoon.
I expected to find minds thirsty for knowledge but instead I found students who complained about their subject so much I struggled to understand why they chose it in the first place. The uni somehow made a fascinating subject like physics, boring. So I left.
Now, as a dev trying to make money from apps online, every day I’m learning. Three years ago when I started to code the computer told me I was stupid all the time. Now I can build an app and get people to use it. This year I’ve learnt about design, marketing, sales, AI and a whole bunch of other tech. Each day the rug could be pulled out from under me with a bug I’ve never seen before, a competitor appearing, a new tax to comply to or another global software outage that takes part of the internet down - this has been happening a lot lately!
I finally have the opportunity to learn all the time and it feels more real than school ever did.
Learning keeps your brain healthy, learning pushes you closer to successes, the focus of learning makes a moment feel more real; when you learn about things you enjoy it can help make the rest of your life more joyful. Life is all about change, and when you’re not changing and growing, you’re dying.
This world is so incredibly weird and beautiful - learning about all its parts is supposed to be exciting and fun. School kills the fun, but don’t ever let it stay dead.
Don’t be a cog
School’s aim is to teach you how to be a cog. This is so that you can go out into the workforce and be a cog there too. School teaches you to chase grades, not life. They don’t say go try to make a business, they say go get a business degree. They teach you to follow the safe path and give you just enough goals to strive for, good grades, good degree, good job, good promotion. Every deadline is more coursework. They put these systems in place - it gives people something to work for.
School pushes the idea forward that this is safe - yet how is it in any way a safe path?
“If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.”
― Terence McKenna
The ceo could decide to sell the company you work at, and if you keep your job, it could change drastically - you had no say in that.
What if all your coworkers are not the people you want to be around?
What if your boss is mean?
What if you get made redundant?
What if you get hit by an illness?
What if a family member gets hit by an illness and you need to take time off work, but you can’t?
What if you wanted to spend some time with your family around Christmas but you’re not allowed.
What if they tell you to move to a different city or country?
It was never a safe path.
This is why people have a mid-life crisis.
One day you wake up when you’re 50 and realize you forgot to live life. Maybe you got sick of your wife always nagging you or maybe your husband is a bit of a loser. Maybe you almost died, only to survive and go back to doing what you hate. You realise you don’t know your own kids, you never went to the places you dreamed of, you never played that instrument or opened that cafe or got good at that sport.
At school, every so often someone would ask the teacher miss, why are we learning this? how will it help us in life? And the teacher would respond with it won’t but you’ve got to learn it for the exams.
This system was never about fostering creativity, encouraging curiosity or teaching you to be a self-sufficient person going out into the world.
This system was there to keep you as a cog. It never cared. But don’t let it take away the fun of learning for you, never stop being curious. Everyone only has one life to live, it would be a shame to spend it having let school squish all the beauty and craziness out of it.