Learning is seeking

Learning is seeking. You don't truly learn by showing up for classes and listening to teachers talk because the subject being discussed is most likely not something you are interested in at the very moment due to a problem you are actively working on.

Learning happens when you seek solutions for real problems you have. You keep digging and experimenting and reading what other people have to say until you find a way to move forward. And then you learn. But in order to have these problems you need to first have a goal and to start working towards that goal.

This is the main issue I see with the current education system: it is push-based rather than pull-based. Top-down rather than bottom-up. It puts children together and feeds them information that they don't currently need. By the time they might need it, they will have forgotten it already anyway. Or it might be outdated.

The current education system is a relic of the industrial era, where people were needed not so much to be creative but rather to be able to perform pre-defined tasks and to behave in a predictable way.

If we want to truly educate our children, all we need to do is to make them curious about certain things and have them set their own goals: play a song they like on a piano, build a website, build a video game... Once they have a goal, they can start breaking it down into steps and then keep experimenting and digging for the information they need as they progress through these steps.