I Learned Every Country in One Day
searchforzero
CLOSED:
Yesterday I sat down and studied the location of every country on Earth. I'm not particularly good at memorization but for some reason I didn't find this task that difficult. I was lucky enough to stumble upon lizardpoint, a website with nice interactive map quizzes. First I started by learning the countries by continent, and once I could look at the unlabeled map and list off each country comfortably for each continent, I moved on to the world map, for which I did the same. I'm likely to mess up Slovenia and Slovakia some time in the future, but in just 24 hours I have improved my knowledge of global geography by a vast margin. This is probably a laughable and childish task to some people who learn this in grade school, but sadly I did not. And even if this was a topic during my childhood schooling, I wouldn't have been interested.
This article isn't actually about me or some silly topic I decided to learn yesterday… I want to make a point about education in general.
Learning out of interest as an adult is such an enjoyable experience. I think it's sad that many education systems around the world consistently kill the desire to learn in children, which manifests as the "I hate school" sentiment. Almost everyone who has graduated secondary school looks back and confirms to themself that they indeed did not need to learn many topics to do what they are doing now. Even academics wish they didn't have to waste time learning fields that they are decisively uninterested in (e.g. myself in English literature courses).
I understand that a kid doesn't necessarily know what they are interested in, but that's a horrible argument for structuring curricula the way we do. We don't allow and encourage kids to study topics that they are interested in, we care about grades over how much a kid is truly learning, and we glorify some types of knowledge over others (think lawyer versus plumber: both are fundamentally respectable jobs but most parents would rather their kid choose the former path). Incoherently, we do all this while pretending one can only learn as a child. Instead of seeing childhood as a the only time people can learn about geography or literature, why aren't we treating it as a precious time to teach children real life lessons? To me, school too often materializes as an enormous missed opportunity. Forcing kids to learn everything is a surefire way to disillusion a large portion of them.
Of course I'm not arguing against such basic education as literacy or basic mathematics, my point is that our educational priorities are misguided and shortsighted. I would rather teach kids how to think rather than what to think, given the fluidity and transience of information.
I don't know what sparked my sudden urge to learn the exact locations of each country in the world, but I do know that learning as an adult is entirely possible. We should focus on giving kids the ability and passion to learn rather than the idea that this is the only chance to learn they'll ever get and that they'd better be an accountant not a musician.