What schooling and culture does to our heads

All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

The school system has conditioned us a certain way. Often this sort of criticism comes from people who did poorly in school. At best, it comes from self-made billionaires who weren’t academic or were dyslexic.

I never got anything other than the top possible grade in any state exam I sat (and I sat them in 2 countries). So while anyone could be open-minded on the issue, I feel my lack of a chip on the shoulder or any other incentive to diss formal education adds a little more credibility. What I have noticed is:

• School doesn’t reward strengths as strongly as it punishes weaknesses. This makes us very aware of our weaknesses and gets us to associate weakness with pain. It tells us to direct our efforts towards our weaknesses, not our strengths. This is probably a bad thing because we can always pair up with someone who can compensate for our weaknesses. We cannot, however, make up for the chances we lost to further our strengths.

• It asks us to follow instructions. Following instructions isn’t a skill rewarded in real life, unless you have just come from IKEA. Seriously though, maybe there was a time when one could get hired and be told what to do and paid well for it – but even I have missed that boat. Anybody currently in school is certainly not going to have that luxury.

• It asks us to not make mistakes. While life appears to work on the mistake-learn-do better cycle, schools teach that mistakes are final failures and should be avoided at all costs. Rather than teaching people to pick themselves up and consider what they would do differently next time, school teaches people not to try. Fear of rejection, abandonment and judgement is everything within a school.

• It teaches us to be compliant. What do I mean by that? You need to learn things you know you will never use in order to get a gold star on your homework. That’s compliance. That’s what employers want. This is a tough one to call as it is specific to a person. Compliance doesn’t necessarily encourage innovation, to put it politely, but it probably builds better teams. Further, if you aren’t a compliant agreeable person by nature, school probably isn’t going to make you so (unlike the previous points, this actually attacks a character trait).

• It teaches us to revere authority. Authority is king in school. A teacher’s word is pretty much final. On the one hand, this translates pretty well onto how employers deal with their employees. On the other hand, it stops us from thinking outside the box. I can’t count the number of times I consciously remember debating something with kids – when I was a kid – and the final line coming from my opponent being: my mammy says so, so that’s the way it is. Schools only make this horrible addiction to certainty worse.

So now that we’ve been through this machine, how do we deal with it? How do we unlearn the nasty habits and build new and better ones?

• Focus on our strengths. Screw the weaknesses. The rest of the world is there to constantly point at our weaknesses. We have to be the advocates for our strengths. I tend to be able to notice things from more angles that other people and be open minded. Hence, I am writing this.

• Decide what we’re after. Yeah, sure, sounds easy. It’s so hard in reality. Different people have different values. Our values will determine what we want in life. Maybe you are one of the lucky ones and your values correspond exactly to what the values you learnt in school. It certainly pays to contemplate what our values are.

We have a very strong desire to be consistent. We hate being wrong, so it’s painful to deconstruct our values. It’s not just an ego thing – we are wired that way. It’s how the placebo effect works. Our brain will make up the difference between the physiological and the perceived through specific chemistry. This is the reason I love mindfulness so much: it helps to disconnect all those false pathways and expose what’s really going on.

Having an understanding of two cultures (the West and Russia), I have always been fascinated how people feel that the values of the place that they just happened to be born in are their very own personal deeply held values. I think one has to actually dig pretty deep to understand what they believe now and what they want to believe.

There’s a conundrum I’ve always struggled with. Ok, so you’ve stripped off the BS. You are ready to find out what you’re actually about. So you ask yourself the question: who am I?.. Only to hear silence in response – what does that mean?!

I think I have the answer to that.

It means you have finally become open-minded. You have finally recognised, on a visceral level, that your values aren’t imposed on you. It is what you make them. There isn’t a ready-made answer. We don’t all come with either an iOs or a Windows operating system. We decide what our own operating system is going to be. So if you are struggling to understand who you are: you are probably asking the wrong question. You are what you ask yourself to be. We are what we pretend to be. We are what we repeatedly do. That’s not me who said that, that K.Vonnegut and Aristotle. Choice is a really fundamental ability, a power even, that is often overlooked.