Education system.

Often I hear that the education system isn’t working, changes are needed, no child left behind, public schools are good/bad, etc.  I agree with the point of a view that the education system is simply outdated.  For every child to be good at everything in this day and age might be an outdated concept.  Odds are that Pushkin wasn’t good at math or Einstein perhaps sucked at history.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

A child can be off the scale on math, but not good at learning Spanish.  The school’s and parent’s attention and focus will be disproportionately on Spanish (or literature, or chemistry or whatever).  Instead of accentuating the math (or literature, or chemistry or Spanish) that the child is gifted, the focus shifts to the weakness, to ensure that the general education or overall education is “in tact”.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

I think that the education system doesn’t need to be repaired.  It needs to be changed completely.  Who cares if, say, Michael Jordan was really bad at chemistry or Steve Jobs perhaps wasn’t that good at sports?  Creating well-educated “cogs” good at everything doesn’t trump helping to create geniuses at certain things while not focusing on the weakness (as much).

On a semi-related note, I’m struggling to believe that this is happening in America.  If parents did something close to this, the social workers would take the kids away:

https://www.upworthy.com/something-sickening-is-happening-to-some-of-our-schoolchildren-and-you-probably-have-no-idea?c=upw1

On an unrelated note, I stumbled on this quote this morning and really liked it:

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
~~  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn