“1791 was the year it happened. I was 24, younger than you are now. But times were different then, I was a man at that age: the master of a large plantation just south of New Orleans.” – From “Interview with a Vampire”

Every couple of days I can’t help thinking about the completely broken, irrational, and abusive education system that we have around the whole world. I also can’t stop myself from reiterating, in my mind, the above quote. “I was a man at that age…”

How many men out there, especially in the developed world, can claim that they are men at the age of 33 (let alone 24)? How many? The developed world (and countries satellite to the developed world) has less and less men, and it’s all because of this broken education system that we have. Here’s why:

– You start going to the nursery at the age of 1. You spend a couple of years there.
– You then spend a couple of years in pre-school.
– You then go to school for about 13 years, until you’re 17-18.
– You then spend a few years in the university, and you typically finish when you’re 23-24.
– You then decide that it might be a good idea to have a masters degree, so you spend 2-3 years trying to get one (hopefully while doing some work on the side).
– You then decide to continue doing a PhD, and then you spend about 3-4 years doing a PhD.
– You’re now about 30 years old, you’re probably not married, and you probably don’t have any work, and you are most likely up to your ears in debt.
– You spend about 3 years trying to get a real job.
– Now, at 33, your life begins, and you can work towards building something for the future (a family, etc…) Oh, and try to completely forget about that cotton plantation that Louis (Brad Pitt) had at the age of 24; you will never have it!

Of course, the above can vary from one person to another, but the common factor that delays one person’s life is always education, which, for some reason, has become more of a goal and less of a mean.

Now, I don’t want to get philosophical about this whole thing, but I’m highly positive that a person is ready for life at the age of 16, and not at the age of 30-33. In school and especially in university, we are taught a lot (and I mean a lot) of garbage. Wrong history (written by the victors and twisted minds), outdated geography/biology/physics, advanced mathematics that we will never use unless we want to become mathematicians, super-deep literature (in at least a couple of languages) that we will never need in real life, and a lot of other garbage.

At the prime of our youth, we are stuck studying, unproductive to the society that we are in. Most of us become somehow productive in our late 20s or early 30s. That’s horrible as it highly diminishes the value that each of us can bring to the world by taking away at least 10 years of our most productive period in life. Not to mention that in younger ages, our ideals are much firmer than in later ages, where the line gets thinner between what’s wrong and what’s right.

The current education system steals our youth (not to mention our parents’ money), encourages procrastination of our real life, reduces our ambitions, increases our dependence on our parents, and reduces our fertility rate (it’s a no brainer that someone who is 23 is much more fertile than someone who is 33).

We don’t have to memorize whatever Socrates or Shakespeare wrote, we don’t have to learn every theory that Archimedes, Pascal, or Newton came up with, we don’t have to learn the highly twisted and the mostly fake history of each country on our planet, we don’t have to know where Swaziland is or what the exact distance between the moon and the earth is (which I don’t believe anyway). We need to learn how to read and write in order to communicate with each other, we need to know the basic mathematics (and basic geometry, algebra, and probability), we need to learn the basic physics and biology, we need to know where the major countries affecting us are, and where our country is, we need to know the history of our country and some other countries (not all of them). I don’t see this taking us 13 years to learn, I don’t see them even taking us 5 years. We can learn everything else that we need after we finish our formal education.

Each year, countries around the world spend trillions on education – that’s taxpayer’s money. Most of that money should be spent elsewhere, perhaps in creating projects that will employ hundreds of millions of young, productive people.

Each year, many higher degree students accumulate more debt learning instead of doing something productive and saving money.

This whole system disworks in a very wrong way and it should be corrected. It’s not doing us any good any more – in fact, it is draining our lives and our pockets. Hopefully the time will come when we get rid of it in favor of a more practical and logical system.

This article (as well as all other articles on this website) is an intellectual property and copyright of Fadi El-Eter and can only appear on fadi.el-eter.com.