A life of tests is no preparation for the tests of life | Aeon Essays

Socrates isn’t giving many graduation addresses these days. Yet this wisdom is at the heart of a new generation of aptitude assessments intended to help individuals, including middle- and high-school students, understand themselves better.

He urges individuals—and parents especially—to abandon the desire for instant gratification and easy answers as early performance on tests isn’t an indicator of professional success. He emphasizes traits over particular skills—be curious, flexible, open-minded, adventurous, experimental, and playful. Try and fail and try again. Explore. Read outsid... See more

Students have lost sight of the teleology, or final purpose, of the education system.7 When you’re in fifth grade, you know clearly that your goal is to get to sixth grade—and it goes like that up through twelfth grade, at which point you’ve spent the past four years of your life preparing for something called “college” along carefully defined line

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Ultimately, the true measure of any educational experience lies in how it empowers individuals to think critically, pursue meaningful goals, and contribute to society in ways that resonate with their authentic aspirations, conventional or otherwise, while maintaining reasonable levels of personal well-being.

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and learn to feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown while maintaining their mental balance is far more difficult tha

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one of the reasons school fails to help people model success is that a series of tests introduces no randomness. Success in real life involves a great and careful search of unknowns, not a pinning down or studying of knowns

education has largely stopped serving its primary purpose, preparing young people to thrive and giving them the skills and the hunger to continue a lifelong journey of learning.