What if children’s education was radically different?
Like every other kid my age, I went to school.
What other option was there anyway?
I did okay in both primary and secondary education. I didn’t like it or hate it. It just was. I didn’t question it. My mom didn’t question it. No one really questioned it. Most of the kids I went to school with are now married and have okay jobs. Most of them don’t particularly like their jobs, but they’re content. They don’t have particularly grandiose ambitions.
In a way, I’m jealous. I wish I could accept that I am just another cog in the machine. But I come at the weird intersection between the Xennial and Millennial generations, and I feel like I have a bigger purpose in life. Ever since I was 8 years old, I’d always hang out with people much older than I. I’m talking 50+.
While I wasn’t particularly stimulated at school, I loved working on the farm, a job I had 10 years of my life. I was working with people who had lived through real shit. They were poor people who were working in subpar conditions to feed their families. To me, they were friends and mentors. I learned more from them growing up than I did in school.
In high school, I didn’t fit in. By that point, all my friends were five times my age. All I wanted was to be “average”. I managed to do it. And I was proud to be “average”.
What the fuck?
A kid shouldn’t strive to be average. What’s the point of living an average life?
But I can’t blame the young Danny. That’s what schools produce for society, average. I didn’t know any better and neither did my mom.
I continued my education in college in computer programming. I thrived doing that while working full-time at the movie theater. Two years in, I was ready to be an entrepreneur. I started my first business when I was 19 years old. I was building custom software for businesses. I wasn’t particularly great, but I got by. If I waited to be perfect, I’d have waited another 10–20 years, maybe longer.
Then I went to university in Software Engineering and hated my life. I couldn’t care for chemistry, physics, and all the other useless crap I knew I’d never use in the near future. Early on, I realized that memory fades. What you don’t use frequently enough, you forget quickly. If I wanted to do differentials today, I’d definitely have to relearn it entirely.
I dropped out after two years and never regretted my decision. I had joined a startup as the first employee while I was pitching another startup at the same time. In the first year at the startup, we grew the company from just the three of us to 24 employees. I built a massively multiplayer online game with zero experience. You would never do such a crazy project in school. I learned a shit-ton more than my friends who were still in school.
After that point, I started a few more businesses and joined a few more early-stage startups. I’ve done so much shit and I’m just 33 years old. All that while not having finished university. But I’m glad I never finished it since I had the best education of my life by living real-life startup scenarios. I was one of the lucky few who realized early on that the school system was broken.
I lived that even more in the past 2 years, where I’ve been deliberately learning 3 new skills every month. I learned to learn, and trust me, it’s not what schools are teaching you. Today, I can pick up tough skills much easier than most people. It’s not because I’m smart, it’s because I dared question education.
Today, my mission is to show the world that education doesn’t have to suck. Through numerous interviews and collaboration with various parties, we’ve identified 23 important issues with the current education system. Half of those existed 80+ years ago, the others are from this century. These issues can all be fixed by assembling the right minds together and taking what Tony Robbins calls “Massive Action”.
I’m a doer. I’ve always been a doer, and I take pride in that. But this is much bigger than me. We’ve seen in 2019 the impacts of rallying for climate change. With the right awareness, the right people will wake up and take action. It’s no surprise then that Greta Thunberg was named the person of the year by Time magazine. She said: “screw this, I’m doing this no matter what”. The same happened years ago with Malala Yousafzai.
Now is the time to change the landscape of our children’s education. Like, radically changing it. The world is evolving at the fastest pace it ever has in the history of mankind, yet not much has changed in education. Granted, there are great efforts out there, but most are not globally accessible enough to have a real splash effect.
Let me implant you with some ideas and reflections:
What would happen if a kid didn’t go to school at all? What’s the worse that could happen? How likely is it to happen? Is it really all that bad?
What if, instead of going to school, a kid would be encouraged to go on an entrepreneur’s journey where it would be okay to fail (even praised). Their desired result would be lessened, just like in real life.
What if they were taught, from the beginning, that the more productive they are, the more quality results they would produce?
What if they were free to explore their creativity in any direction they wanted and see where it takes them? What if they could “quit” when they become bored with something, while still getting taught the importance of persistence and perseverance?
What if the projects they work on could have an actual positive impact on the world? There’s no better motivator. The more good you do, the more good you want to do. Motivation isn’t a problem with the right purpose.
And if they don’t want to change the world, that’s fine too!
I’m not saying it would 100% be about doing whatever the fuck they want, but rather than sit down and shut up, they’d be tutored and mentored by people who feel like that can help them. No one makes it without a guide, but no one can be a guide if they take care of 30+ children who all learn differently.
Great teachers are guides, provided that they either rebel against the administration (in which case they are reprimanded or let go) or in the rarer case, are supported by the administration. What lucky students!
What if we mentored children instead of making them accept all the BS we’re currently feeding them. We don’t need mindless machines in the workforce anymore, we have plenty of them, at a fraction of the cost.
We need innovators. We need polymaths. We need doers.
We need our children to be adaptable, much more so than any previous generations. No way the current education system can afford that currently! It needs alternatives.
Here’s a famous quote by Henry Ford:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
That’s what people are asking for currently. They want better teachers. They want better courses. They want better students.
Screw that!
We already have awesome teachers. Enable them to do what they’re good at!
We have great free courses and learning material all over the web. Education is of the highest quality it has ever been, and it’s free!
There’s no problem with our students. We just have to respect that not everyone learns the same way!
If you’re building a new online course platform, you’re missing the mark. If you’re teaching new ways of teaching, you’re also missing the mark.
These are not radical enough.
I have a kid on the way, and there’s nothing I dread more than failing him/her from the start. If no one wakes up and does something radical, I’ll have to step up. Nothing pushes one to action more than have a deep sense of necessity. And while others don’t yet see it, I’m hoping they will before it’s too late.
That is my mission for this decade.
Here’s to radically better education!
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