I am frustrated by the education system. The reason so many people want to be entrepreneurs right now, is because our education system is failing us. And I don’t mean primary school. But EVERYTHING after it. I look back to what I was taught in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and not much has changed. Math is still held in such a high regard, but they are teaching stuff 99% of students will never use in their work career, or in life for that matter. Geometry, trigonometry, linear algebra… really? What about teaching high schoolers how to read a financial statement? Or managing finances? Or opening up a savings account? Why not teach real world math? If you want to learn geometry, well then do it, but do you need a teacher for that, in today’s digital age? Go to YouTube, Udemy, or ask away on LinkedIn.
At the World Economic Forum in January 2018, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, said “If we do not change the way we teach, 30 years from now, we will be in trouble. The way we teach, the things we teach our kids, are the things from the past 200 years. It is knowledge based. And we cannot teach our kids to compete with machines … We have to teach them something unique, so that a machine can never catch up with us.”
Robots Will Keep Replacing Jobs. How Can We Compete Tomorrow?
Ma also believes that robots will replace 800 million jobs by 2020. With Amazon around, does anyone doubt this?
So how can humans gain an upper hand on machines? Where are all the communication courses? And I don’t mean how to read great works like Shakespeare or Hemingway, or how to write poems, but how to communicate with people? How to take criticism, and how to give it? How to better read social cues. How to conquer the job interview process. How to become self aware. How to get more out of your team, whether you’re leading it or a part of it. Why aren’t these tools and techniques being practiced when we’re 15, 20, 25 years of age?
