A personal review on educational experiences 2026-07-31 02:30 UTC

The predominant deficit I see is the question-and-answer system, taught through template learning. It promotes a child who is trying to meet grades in accordance with KPIs, when what I want for my own daughter, after taking everything into consideration, is that she discuss ideas. I want to hear her express ideas and communicate fearlessly, without worrying about audience alignment, because independence and agency are the purpose of education. We actively insist that it is wrong to plagiarise, yet in my limited experience there is scarcely one thing published in the literature that is truly novel. The forefathers are silent, for they suffered quietly and did not seek credit; they left behind only some evidentiary records, to illustrate that they existed rather than to teach.

My views are based on design principles and are simple. Rather than publishing a theatrical play on words in policy, frameworks, or legislation, as it should and may happen, we should refine and realign dichotomies and reduce the paradoxes, misunderstandings, and misalignments within our given boundary conditions. This is implemented by leaders understanding that they themselves are afraid of learning, of learning difficulties, and of bad upbringing, albeit being intelligent leaders. The knowledge corpus is issued with counterproductive haste and impinges on the nerves of the student; it is not simply deferred to a disinterested student who is then blamed for not meeting the requisite qualifications to understand. A corrupt framework invariably affects students immensely. A great guide is found in military communication, where the infantry, when determining a counterstrike strategy, are informed by the command to attack but are also clearly informed why. The “why” is missing right through the entire national educational framework, firstly for the principal educators and then for the higher-order extant studentship. You can never teach when you, as a professor, are undergoing a life crisis because you cannot find a girlfriend. It shows. All speculative teaching methods are adsorbed by students through osmosis, and these students later in life pursue vehement lives of truculence and even politics.

It is not easy to be a student, academic, or scientist; it is a ternary problem, and at the extremes we may observe quaternary odds. The majority of knowledge is acquired only to get a job, not with pure intentions, and then it is game over. The educational organisations at this juncture have acquiesced to commercial gain and to management theories common in global manufacturing industries. No matter what discipline is being promoted at any given educational institution, common inferences are emergent: Resource, Industrial, and Labour Economics. At all levels we are processing future labourers, including the ternary aspects of an educational system. What I miss from my education is not getting to know those who taught me; I miss them immensely. They were all good people, going through unspoken existential crises while looking after and being burdened by miscreants, filled with a sense of humour. Frankly, I think they were just happy to be alive. They tried like hell not to lower the standard of education, while being indentured by labour, industrial, resource, and human-resource elicited economics and frivolities. What is lost in education is lineage, meaning that if you see a professor and check the pedagogy of the discipline, their contribution has a prominent sentient predecessor in the chosen discipline. Naturally, this is a cryptic expectation. Knowledge elicitation in accordance with Western sciences is not more than 400 years young, if material outcomes matter at all.

We prompt capitulation because we all suffer from tall poppy syndrome. Apart from our nominal responsibilities to our education, we are here to develop good relationships with our peers, test the sensitivities we behold, rise above them, and use the derived knowledge maps and graphs to help those suffering from a similar ailment. Cognitive Bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases) is a very childish term, used because we don’t know the subject, we cannot admit we don’t know, and it is the easiest method to dismiss growth. In summary, a cognitive bias is a flexible decision-making instrument in the mind, inherent in any given mental model; it is not a weapon. I would have known this in grade 8, if my teachers had spent time with me.

The predominant concern for me in students, one that remains unsolved, is anticipatory exhaustion and execution. In the legal process, the resulting adjudication is not the punishment; rather, the process prior to it is exacting on the mind and body. The student anticipates to such an extent that they become avoidant of curriculum expectations, due to a fear of looking stupid. In the duration, they experience fear and anxiety, the work to be submitted gets delayed, medical certificates appear, suddenly grandpa died, or they even quote a force majeure clause, just for a quiz. The outcome is that the person develops psychiatric comorbidities that become manifest because they don’t want to be humiliated or they dislike a difference of opinion; then comes lithium carbonate or clozapine, and you know the rest. In industry, if you raise a complaint, the management ensure that the cause of the complaint is amplified so that the person leaves employment, with very little recourse.

Suddenly we give rise to a CRICOS Identifier (https://cricos.education.gov.au/); now we can waste foreign students on teaching them to type well, and call it Information Technology Cert 4, cost 32,000 AUD/year. But hey, who needs an intentional education, in life or in an institution? The comedy starts the first time you are shafted, educated or not. Then each member of the community wants a say in academia, science, economics, and all disciplinary knowledge. They found out they don’t want to be managed; they want to lead.