I Knew That

When I was in high school we studied Irish as a second language.  By the age of 16 I was able to have complete conversations in the language and read and write in it.  Since leaving High School however, over the last 12 years I've never had need to use the language.  After 12 years without speaking, reading, or writing the language, I am at a level that I would consider a complete beginner again.  While the thought of returning to it is somewhat appealing, I think it would be a wasted effort for the simple reason that I never used it before and I am unlikely to use it again.

This isn't the only piece of knowledge that I've lost over the years.  I recently had a discussion with a few friends about our ideas for national curriculum reform which led to a debate about how useful and how necessary the subject were that we studied when we were at school.  On the subject of Maths there were quite a few things which we could once do which we now can't.  For example, simultaneous equations, quadratic equations, and trigonometry.  There has long been a point raised in debate here in the UK that our modern school system teaches students to pass an exam rather than teaching the subject matter.  To an extent I agree with that point because although you can argue in 12 years if you never used something then you would probably be rusty at it anyway, I would hasten to add that in respect of some subjects as little as 6 months would be enough for me to forget it completely.  My Summer Holidays in High School lasted 3 months and in that time returning to some subjects would be difficult as the 3 month gap without ever thinking about it caused me to forget quite a bit - and I know I wasn't alone as September was often a month of revision of the previous year's topics in school.

Coming forward in time a few years to my University days, next month it will be 10 years ago that I started University and last month it was 7 years since I graduated.  In that time a lot has changed in my life and a lot of what I learned I never used.  From the first year of my degree when I studied Maths for Computing there are several topics I once knew inside out, such as predicate logic, set theory, vector math, and combinatorics among others.  Now though if I was asked to do an exam on any of these subjects I likely would not pass.  In my time at University I saw a ridiculous about of students "cram" for their exams the night before which to me always seemed alien.  I never did that and the reason was because I was adamant if you did not know it by the night before the exam then you shouldn't pass the exam.  3 months later when someone asks you to do something you passed an exam to say you could do what would you actually do?  Go and desperately try and revise everything to be able to do it?  What if you don't have the time? 

It makes you wonder what the point of education is, if the focus is a glorified memory exercise rather than actually teaching the subject matter.  What is the point of having a piece of paper that says you can do something if you can't actually do what it says you can?  When I graduated, the field I wanted to enter into was game design and the first question every employer asked was "Can we see your portfolio?" - they did not care about education at all.  While the games industry is particularly ruthless in this regards, asking for proof that you can do what you say and ignoring for the most part your education, other industries aren't so.  Most other industries take your education at face value which begs the question, how much time in the UK is spent by workers googling how to do what they said they could do?

When it comes to recruitment I am of the mindset of many banks - it should involve an interview and an assessment centre stage where you progress through a series of assessments to determine whether you can actually do what you say you can.  When I stop and think about that however it does make me think about people in this country who have been unemployed for a long time, and people who have been in the same job for a long time and suddenly find themselves having to look for another.  In both these cases you will be seeking a job where your skill-set has cracks in its foundations for the simple reason that you never fully understood anything you learnt in the first place, all you did was remember what to say and when to say it to pass the exam.

Maybe the real point of education is to teach people how to bullshit their way through life.  Maybe the only point of education is to teach you how to lie convincingly with enough scraps of truth to make it seem like you know what you are talking about, to get a job where you don't actually know what you are doing.  That does make you rather depressed when you think about the number of people in jobs who are wholly unqualified to do those jobs.