Why Modern Education might lead to the demise of civilization

I was thinking about the way in which modern education is taught in schools today. And I realize that the way in which we ram down theorems and rules actually harms the ability of children to innovate. The problem is that instead of discovering how stuff is done, they are taught in an hour what might have taken someone years to find out in an earlier age.

What is the problem with this?
- There is so much indoctrination that we get trapped within the boundaries of what we have been taught or what we have read. How can we think out of the box, when our mental model itself is made of the box?

I mean that, if a person has not done a PHD, he might be able to find out a better solution than a PHD simply because he is not thinking confined to the boundaries of what he has learnt. He may be wrong most of the time, but there is a 1% chance he might come up with the next theory of relativity.

Maybe Einstein was not intelligent – he was very poor in school, maybe he learned so less that, in the process of thinking based on his own thought model, he was able to come up with something different. Maybe no-one else has come up with something as big as the theory of relativity because they have learned too much?

I have seen toppers in class unable to think straight when confronted with a problem – because they are very good at learning what someone else had figured out, but never learned how to figure out something on their own. So, I say, the more we learn, the more we bind ourselves in mental shackles.

Why has India never come up with an Einstein or a Thomas Alva Edison?
Because there is too much indoctrination, too much mugging up, too much stuffing the brain with stuff other people struggled to understand over the years and came up with thinking from scratch.

We tend to forget that education, like software should be tailored to the human brain, and not the other way around.

If a student fails in class, maybe it is not the failure of the student. Maybe it is the failure of the education system which is not able to get through to the most advanced computer ever designed – the human brain.

Maybe the student who fails is the best suited to come up with the brilliant innovation 10 years later, and the topper is destined to be struggling trying to resolve a problem nobody wants to solve. An interesting way to look at it is that, when a software crashes a computer, we do not blame the computer – we blame the software. If education is “software”, and the computer is the very different, unique, special human brain – why is the brain said to have failed?

If we understand this, maybe we won’t collapse like the older civilizations have in the past...