I may not call myself as an education expert but i have pondered on this subject a lot and actually worked in this field. It could be influenced by my dad being a professor maybe :) As of November 2023, i have been working as software instructor at the company called Bilge Adam Technologies for 2.5 years. Naturally, i have more of software development tutoring experience since i am not graduated as a teacher. But i realized it is a wide topic when you want to talk about how education should or should not be. Most of the experts and educators would agree with this i suppose. (Upon finishing writing this post, i felt the need to express that the subject of the matter is the system, not the teachers or tutors or educators. So, no offense :)
Most of my analysis is based on my experience in Turkey but it would have similarities all around the world. We have a very bad educational system here. It makes a big deal out of insignificant numbers and bad education is killing the future. Learning, teaching and educating are actually very different concepts. We usually confuse or disregard one of them. We are factorizing the processes which in fact should be tailor-made according to place and time and the subject or the people. I don't mean to lecture anyone here but i have written about the mistakes i have witnessed in the field of education, based on my own experiences. There will be 4 sections here. Elementary level, pre-college years, college and educating ourselves. Software education will be another post.
You can write a thousand lines on how Turkey 's educational system is inefficient, unproductive and still unstable. But i will try to stick to being analytical. In our childhood, the school was a place of exams to be passed. I am not sure what was the situation before me but i think today's kids are experiencing the same. Back in my time (like it has been a century :D ) we used to have grades from 1 to 5. 1 is the worst 5 is the best. We were evaluated based on these grades and received annual passing degrees. There were behavioural grades too in these reports, which are the observations of the teachers. So you might say "this kid is good but grades are not so much" in some cases. But our main goal was to have good grades in all the branches or subjects. Therefore, in extreme cases, you might have "this kid is a nuisance but passing the exams" kind of situation.
The system is so flawed, if your grade is 4 for one branch, people would criticize you saying "aaah, you didn't work hard". If you get a 3, "this kid is hopeless, go work in a factory". Even from the elementary school, you give lessons on math, science, turkish, history, art ...etc all sorts of fields and expect your children to get perfect grades from all of them, let alone trying to discover their skills and gifts. From those years you are killing creativity and adapting them to rote learning. Normally, the grades are categorized as 1 is fail, 2 opinionated pass, 3 is so-so but ok, 4 is good and 5 is perfect. So technically, passing with grade 3 is actually normal. If you are getting 5, that brings out your talent in that area. We were focused on getting the perfect score for every lesson and seeded the all-knowing smart-ass people.
The children are growing under pressure because you expect your child to concentrate on their lessons and pass them with good grades. So, apart from religious dictation, there can be school stress too. Nobody asks these kids "what do you like". Instead they ask "which one is your best subject", like there is some sort of competition among them. Notice the small nuance. There are a very small number of individuals who can assess themselves and say things like i like drawing or math or linguistics and etc. Not to brag, but i was kind of one of them :) Yes, it may be too much to expect a kid to be conscious of themself. But this is exactly why we have something called parenting. You need to give the opportunity to experience what they are good at and enable them to pursue those fields.
I mentioned that learning and educating are different things. We usually just teach and praise those who can recite like a parrot. We are igniting this from the elementary school. (At least it is the situation in Turkey) We are trying to cast them into the same shape instead of showing interest and bring out the best of them. So both our education system and parenting abilities are bad. There is this saying, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. It is so true. You need to show reason and result or the way of discovery or examplarize things instead of just dicating "this is this, that is that". This way, you can shape the unshaped dough and give them new habits and improve their behaviour and knowledge healthy.
And of course, you need empathy for this. You have been a kid right? Their world and time is different than yours. Do you understand what they feel or expect? Empathy is a hard skill and it is vanishing slowly. Can you put yourself in their shoes? Would you think your grades would all be perfect? Would you like this pressure of perfectionism? Would you like your parents bragging over your grades, which you have worked your ass off to achive? Would you like them to criticise you in front of your friends or relatives because of your lack of perfect grades?
There is one more thing. The formats of education. Every branch has to have their own unique format to teach. You can't teach everything by writing on the blackboard. You can't assume the same methodology would work on math and language or science and history or etc. Each individual branch has teachers to think about it. My expertise is on software development so it will be in another post. Sometimes you need to examplarize, sometimes prove, sometimes teach with games or someties repeat it again and again. There are numbers of different ways. But the most important thing is to keep in mind that teacher is teaching human beings.
With all these problems, kids are growing without properly experiencing childhood. As a result, you end up having a kid, just bigger in size and age. There is a concept called parenting, i wonder if people are still aware of it. Do you think letting your kids grow on streets or lend them to teachers are proper parenting? If you don't pay attention and effort to eduacate about basic human values, being hard working but not a nerd, having empathy and things like that, the kid will try to find its own shape, with the involvement of their friends. Then you start asking why this kid turned out to be like this. Education is heavily related to social dynamics but i will not shift focus here.
After a couple of years, we are stepping into high school years, in other words, puberty. The psychology of these times will be very different. Because of the flawed system, we are growing up without a perception of the world and experiencing the resulting problems these times. The subject now is a teenager who came out of a rote learning system and has to make decisions to shape his/her life to get into a college. Even this sentence alone rings alarm bells :D
We were all teenagers. I was less teenager :) We were prepeared for high school and also for university like race horses. It seem like this situation appears even in the elementary school these days. In high school years, your grades might be less effective or important but you already have a big concern called college exams. The youngsters need to discover themselves, set a target, steadily work for that target (during the puberty), get a good score in the big exam and achieve the right to go to university. In some cases, they may have to earn a full scholarship due to financial situations. Or they can even disregard what they want because of low potential of jobs in their desired field. So the responsibility is very big here.
Here in Turkey, we used to have these hard science and soft science emphasized fields, or equal of both, in high school and university. I think it still exists. (I speak like 100 years old) This distinction was meaningful. Even it's a little late, the students can have a chance to focus their attention on their own prefered fields. But if i remember correctly we have a system that punishes the students of a hard science high school if they choose a soft science field in college. We fix system from one side and break it on the other side. Nevertheless, teenagers who are starting to perceive a bigger picture of the world, have a chance to choose a profession that would satisfy them in their life. Naturally, a human can have a soft sciece brain or a hard science brain or a little bit of both. But we have a logic of money making industries or professions. So the students are sometimes disregarding their hard or soft skills and choosing the one that will financially work for them.
I would say at least a high school level of education is a neceesity for every citizen. Also, instead of putting all these high schools in the same category, let there be 3 categories. Like hard science based, soft science based, or equally based or even art based. Therefore in each type, you have high scored and low scored schools. These high schools should focus on introducing the professions and guiding. Back in our day, we were taught math, geometry, literature, chemistery, biology, history and some advanced calculus like derivatives, integrals and trigonometry since we were hard sicence based high school. A freaking soup of fields.
Personally i am not against learning new things. The trouble was, these were all part of the college exam. From the elementary to college, there should be a basis for most important areas which i think are math, turkish (in my country), history and geography. But i can't memorize all those wars and dates in the history. I am just not good at it. It's not that i complain about "what will it be good for in my life", because somethings are like third wheels of a bicycles. They help you travel easily under certain circumstances. But when we are talking about skills, you shouldn't be pushing. We used to have the aim to get the highest score so we just said "memorize and continue". This neither helped us like the lessons or absorb them properly. I used to like physics back then and was kind of good at it. I tried to keep it as a conscious teenager.
Of course we have the element of empathy here too. You can't expect those teenagers to obey your rules and authority, be conscious of their choices and realize their actions will have consequences. We are lacking this too. We have a belief that punishments can teach things. We used to have high school teachers we really like. The common treat of them was their ability to reach us and talk to us like a friend, without compromising their states as teacher. When you say "study your lessons or your life will be f.ed up" it will never influence in a good way, or even reach them. Even if this is right and the small mistakes of youth will turn into damaging crashes of later times, there should be a proper way to convey this concern, right? We are questioning how to teach each different lessons or fields in the elementary school. Here we should question how to impose responsibility and turn them into down to earth people.
Without all these, we have a format dictating to learn everything, study night and day, your rivals are not sleeping (i want to say i don't f..ing care), if you can't get into medicine you will have no jobs ...etc. We also have parents not favouring some professions or jobs. According to them, some jobs are good some are bad. These people are successfully growed single mindedly, so much so they think their own experience is valid for the whole world. We also have a great economical depression in the country. Even though you can overcome these, there is a stress for choosing a valuable job. Being young is hard in this country. Because you neither have to power to change things or to get out of the system.
This is how we spend high school years with a thousand problems and without realizing who we are. We will also realize the consequences of this in the college. It looks like we consider a number called age getting higher as growing up. The concern of these years should not be exams and stress. The teenagers who are depressed because of these problems may think of college as an escape or freedom. We already have generational conflicts and values of being a family is degenerated. This can all go cumulatively wrong.
Here in Turkey, politicians made universities grow like fungi and at the same time, they have became inadequate. Their requirements got lower, they have more quota than they can support, it also made unemployment rate look decreased since the studying youth is not counted as unemployed ...etc. We have an empire of mediocracy. I am resisting the temptation to talk about politics here. Let's stick to the reasoning. The teenagers who are oblivious to world's facts are choosing a profession or a college based on their desires or ambitions. In some cases, they are just forced to get a degree and a diploma or whatever they can get their hands on. Of course this sometimes causes regrets along the way later. The ideal university must be producing people who are able to keep up with the modern age and be universal. These people will have some form of career and will be touching human life directly or indirectly. They will earn their life and create added value. It wasn't so serious back in the high school but here, the simple mistakes will have dire consequences. You are building a society here.
Unfortunately our universities are collecting lecturers from irrelevant branches and make them give whatever course they can. There are optional courses that you can't take or you have to take :) There is corruption or favouritism in the academic personnel and it is no good for students. Course contents are not updated parallel to developments around the world. There is not much practical learning, either it is neglected or impossible. The majors that has to go out in the field or a lab are taught inside the classes on paper. We have tons of problems.
The teenagers in college years are starting to look for their place in the world. This is the issue that overlooked in highschool. They suddenly get problems like having a profession, making money and network or permanent friends, all at the same time. Because they reach these years through a memorization based system and mostly alone. Because of this, they might concentrate on other things, other than preparing themselves for real life, like going into politics, joining mafia or using substances... Because they occasionaly find their self definition there. Moreover, our incompetent teachers are unable to say "you are individuals who have individual value and you will complete yourself with the vision you have acquired here". Every stage is trying to make up for the deficiencies of the last stage.
Let these problems aside, think about the most inccocent mistake. Choosing a wrong major or a profession. Our college exam is nonsensical, but we also have uninformed preferences. For example, i have seen people who hates math going to engineering or who can't even recite 3 internal organs to medicine. This means depression, because you are trying to be someone you are not meant to be. Also, this means you are a danger to society, because you can kill people with a wrong diagnosis or with a faulty airplane engine. Bottom line is, there is no room for mistakes here in the college years. Even if you decide to go for a different major, you will lose 2-3 years of your life. But time is not a free resource.
Ideally, college must be an opportunity for students to experience new people, new ideas or new environments, outside of their home or city. They can get ready to manage their own life. It should be a rehearsal for them to see how they can place themselves in the society. Even more, they should have boyfriends or girlfriends so that they can understand how to communicate with the opposite gender. Maybe they will make mistakes too. Completing college remotely (after the pandemic) or even going to college in the same city is partially an incomplete experience. Of course i know a lot of people have financial difficulties. But the experiences you haven't had will resurface or come back at you when you take control of your own life. Sometimes in the form of a sentence you can't complete or a scene you can't enter or an opportunity you can't take advantage of.
One crucial aspect of the universities is the experience of their field. We have some form of internships, which is good. There should also be some form of projects or thesis towards the end. It will create the opportunity to apply what you have learned, insted of settling with your academic knowledge. Because that would result in an uneducated person, even though not untaught or illiterate. In the software field, i am hearing students completing interships as software projects because of the pandemic. Therefore they might lack the experience of working in a team or managing business side of things or getting to know a system bigger than their own project. Every profession have their practicing phase. An unpracticed graduate is like a leaf in a wind. It would be very nice to see private sector cooperation with universities here. Even the government can bring a policy for this. I mean for god's sake, we should have something that works after more than a decade of educating right?
Apart from the education system, there is education of oneself, being educatable as a human. As i have mentioned before, the social side is also heavy of this subject. Educatiblity requires transformability. Learning is a simple act that every living brain can carry out more or less. But educating is absorbing what you learn, applying it in your life or changing yourself along with it at some level. If you are the same person after years of reading, watching, seeing or listening, if you don't get any kind of a new perspective of things, i call that ignorance.
We first have to make ourself educatable. Even being a human requires some level of education. If it was as easy as distinguishing right or wrong or trying to do it, artificial intelligence would be a human too. We also have education for our behaviours or emotional intelligence. These must be able to improve without their teachers or educators. It won't add anything to us, if we read or research to prove our points. In other words, we shouldn't be narrow minded or unidirectional. Then we can think about how one can be educated or how should be a good educational system.
Does reading teach someone things? Probably yes. But is a knowledgable one always a helpful or valuable? Don't think so, no. I am sure you have seen examples of this. We are only focusing on teaching side of things in this life. Everyone is trying to pass the responsibility of educating to others, or simply ignore it. Well, if we knew the importance, we would have a meaningful and down to earth education system to begin with and this blog post would have been unnecessary.
Long story short, our educational system failing all over. There should be social skills developing in elementary years alongside the lessons. In the high school years, there should be the wisdom of being the engineers or doctors or judges or teachers of tomorrow given to teenagers, instead of the stress of college exams. Colleges must produce people who have qualifications to set sail into the world and know how to be a part of society, instead of repeating the same old courses over and over every year. I don't know who will fix all these problems. Do i expect the teachers to fix everything? No, of course not. We have systemmatical problems and mentality flaws. If the system is wrong, the solution must be changing the understanding that created it.
After this post, you can have a whole new post about who is the teacher, tutor or lecturer. But i don't have enough knowledge about what is a teacher or how should it be. I will later have another post about software education. This post turned out to be a dark and boring one. I tried to look for a solution at the root by asking how did we end up here. But i am sure you might have flashbacks of your own life or had your life rolling before your eyes. Don't worry you are not dying, you've just read a blog post :) See you at the next post :)
Ömer FARUK Balci̇
Çok haklısınız hocam , bence üniversite bitmeden üniversitenin içerisinde bir iş dünyası olmalı özellikle yazılımcılar için 👏🏼