Un-Diagnosing Educationitis

Cutting Down on the Need to Defend

“What if you could only subtract to solve problems?” - Tim Ferriss

IN FOOTBALL, everybody gets giddy about the playmaking midfielders and superstar strikers; there’s rarely much fanfare for the defensive side of the game. It turns out that creation is much more exciting than maintenance.

But winning teams statistically concede the fewest goals. You can have the best manager, the best facilities, the best of everything, but if you're letting in goals (or scoring own goals!), you ain't gonna win any trophies.

At the start of a new year, it’s tempting to think about new year’s resolutions. New ideas, new habits and new tools you can adopt to augment your work and life.

But an important lesson I learned in 2023 during my first year of working travel is how beneficial it can be to subtract—to cut back on unworn clothing, unused apartment space and unrealistic expectations.

It’s in this spirit of cutting back that I’m choosing to start 2024 not by bolstering my offence but by tightening my defence. Where am I already exposed? How am I wasting resources? What could I stop doing that would set me up to win?

One contender for the scrap heap is a personal story of mine. It’s a story I tell very often about my primary and secondary schools not being very good—that up to the age of 16, I basically had “a shit education.”

I started believing this story in 2011 when I moved to London for university. I watched a TED talk by the educator Sir Ken Robinson about problematic school paradigms: How we wrongly see people as either “academic” or “practical,” how schools are modelled on outdated factories with separate facilities, how kids are taught in same-age batches as if the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture. Robinson’s talk was a real quake moment for me as it explained a lot about why I’d found school so backward and uninteresting.

There I was at university surrounded by all this culture and history and new possibility—and students who actually liked what they were doing and wanted to work hard—and I became jaded about my comparatively lame school experience.

I’ve since snatched every moment I can to complain about school, about the lack of role models, the dilapidated buildings, the bloated class sizes and how it was trendier to be tough than it was to be talented. I’ve concluded that my entire ten-year stint at school was a lamentable waste of everyone’s time—mine, my parents’ and my teachers’.

There is some truth to my story and it has been useful in certain ways. It’s made me more interested in education and eager to make up for lost time.

But 13 years on, I’m starting to understand my story’s questionable triple role: it gave me a way to distinguish myself when I needed help, a way to claim extra kudos when I did well and a way to excuse myself when I did badly. Whenever I told people "my schools were shit," what I was really implying was, “I was left disadvantaged, my team is a player down, therefore I deserve more attention and credit.”

The older I get, the less consistent my school story is with another story I know to be truer: that people do their best with what they have.

Even if my story was true, it glosses over the fact that education can, for an Englishman living in the internet era, be a lifelong pleasure and privilege.

My school story is a lazy story because it gets me out of thinking critically. That’s the most obvious red flag; the story’s the only thing that hasn’t changed in 13 years when everything else—including me—has, which shows how dogmatic and suspiciously rigid it is.

Stories may be so short, simple-sounding and specific that they may not seem like stories at all: “I’m unlucky in love,” “I’m not creative,” “I’m always running late.” Such stories are like optic nerves, subtly but significantly shaping our worldview.

In 2024, I’m un-diagnosing myself as a victim of education; cutting back on my need to defend.

Here’s a new story I want to tell for the next 13 years:

I wouldn’t change a thing about school. My teachers were funny and kind and did their best with what they had. I learned how to entertain myself and find what I like. There was a lot of diversity and I grew up with kids from all backgrounds. This has helped me to welcome differences, develop strong social skills, value humility, stand up for myself and get prepared for the realities of the real world and the job market. School was awesome. It was exactly what I needed it to be.

Not picking any new year’s resolutions—but going for anti-resolutions instead—was something I agreed to do with three of my writing peers who wrote about it too. Here’s Becky’s piece, Lavinia’s piece and Linart’s piece.

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Thank you to Linart at Better Meant, Becky at Beck At It, Meryl at Curiosities, Georg at Treeckster, CansaFis at Thee CansaFis Foote Show and Aurora at Aurora's Almanac for ideating with me and editing this.