Vasco Névoa • Like Ian, I agree that we are first and foremost the sum of our experiences. Hence we cannot escape the shared experience that is school. It formats us, whether we like school or not. The deeper question is then: shouldn’t we be more than just that sum? We all believe that we should be capable of using all that experience in novel ways, by remixing it and re-contextualizing it, and we see the world becomes better when we do it. The problem is that this creative thinking implies “doing things differently”. Stepping outside the norm. And being different, like Michelle pointed out, is usually frowned upon in the academic world. It starts in the kindergarten and goes all the way up to college. If you act differently, you’re either weird or cheating. And this is one point where I’d like to make a positive criticism: not all cheating is bad. Some of it is quite creative. Some of it is creative enough to make a difference in the capacity for survival in extreme or unusual conditions (like, say, a global crisis?) Personally, I was always the “different” kind of student. Mostly I was just weird and sometimes loud-mouthed, and sometimes I felt I had to cheat to survive like anyone else. It was a very long and very tough fight, and by the time I finished college I thought I had won: I knew the system and more or less how to navigate it with moderate success. I kept my imagination to myself and just concentrated on being “compatible”, which made me an excellent asset for any company who was looking for a robotic humanoid to expand their production line. But in truth, I had lost. I lost my independence of thought. So, along about 10 years of “professional career”, I ended up seeing that it was exactly those personal traces that were so much frowned upon that were actually valuable in the real world: autonomy of opinion, transversal thinking, imagination… the things I had to keep in a box in order to succeed in academia are the things society actually needs in order to survive and thrive. I’ve been investing in my old self for the past few years, trying to recover that imaginative child that didn’t take “no” as an acceptable option. The good news is that I’m slowly getting there. The bad news is that there is a critical point of no return, at least apparently, and that others are not as lucky. Some of my classmates fared very well in academia, but very poorly outside. They forgot how to think independently, and worst of all they lost their self-confidence. I know some other people that just gave up their mind, transformed into a neural message recorder, a knowledge sponge, and are now capable of memorising just about anything you throw at them, but are utterly incapable of criticising what they have learned. These are the casualties of the “education war”, for we are at war with our nature when we force ourselves to memorise something we don’t even like. And they happen because school is a massive logistic system, and most people believe it must be managed as such, leaving no room for individuality — that would be too complex to manage. Criticising constructively, I believe that “cheating” must be revised. The system must welcome some forms of cheating. For example, if a student blatantly copies another student’s test by peeking over the shoulder, that’s plain stealing and no benefit comes from it. But if two or three students work together to split the heavy curriculum between themselves and share their knowledge during the exams, that’s actually very organised and competitive team work. The kind of successful team work that companies kill for. This is another aspect I think the schooling system has to seriously improve in the short term: promote self-reliance and individuality via team work. Less individual exams, more team challenges. And more group learning. Cramming 30 to 50 kids into the same classroom in front of a teacher is not group learning; they have to be able to experience the subject freely, to discuss, to debate, to contradict, to find the logic behind it — TOGETHER. This is what takes people to finding their place in society — a place where they feel useful, not the first place where they can survive. Like Melanie says, there are some fantastic teachers out there, I had some. Unfortunately they are fighting a loosing battle against the majority of bosses, colleagues, students, and parents. This positivism of believing in the individual student and bringing out its best personal features is something that has to be institutionalized, or we will just keep making humanoid robots. Which are defective by nature, in that role. Some of the “alternative” northern european and north-american schools have achieved this goal. But why are they viewed as the exception instead of an excellent example to follow? Because of logistics. It is far easier to control a system with a simplistic rule set, than it is to care for quality.