For many students, education is just a job: memorizing facts they may well never use in their real lives.
For parents, though, education is about setting your child up for life.
The value of education does not lie in acquiring knowledge. After all, facts these days are literally at your fingertips.
So what is the value of education? Not acquiring knowledge but applying knowledge.
It’s identifying relevant, accurate information and using it appropriately.
This means not trusting AI. This means questioning what you learn on the internet. This means fact-checking and cross-referencing sources.
It also means drawing your own conclusions.
In short, as I see it, the ultimate point of education is learning how to solve problems.
The one thing we all know we will do every day of our lives is deal with problems. We just don’t know yet what those problems will be. So we have to be prepared.
But children don’t know what they want to do yet. They haven’t yet been introduced to all the wonders of this world.They haven’t yet found their passions. And it will be different for everyone. Depending on our life choices and the jobs we get, each person has to deal with vastly different problems.
Problem-solving is a genuinely useful, universal skill that appeals to even the most stubborn students while actively exciting invested ones.
Being able to work things out for oneself is empowering and inspiring. Education suddenly becomes enjoyable, satisfying and life-changing when the student learns how to think for themselves.
The actual content doesn’t matter – I have taught these fundamental skills to students via Test Prep, Math, Essay-writing, English literature, Formal Logic, Philosophy, Latin, French, Physics, Chemistry, Statistics, History and far more beyond.
The subject doesn’t matter because every aspect of human life has problems that need solving.
Once learnt, these skills are never lost. Mastering them at a young age is worth the investment of time (for the student) and money (for the parent).
Learning how to process information accurately, how to think logically, and how to make confident conclusions is exciting, interesting and valuable – that will never, ever be lost.
