End of a chapter

You are who you are of several things. One of those those influencers for sure is the school you are going to - from kindergarden to university. The peers you meet, the classes you take, the teachers that you experience.

For me the official education will end tomorrow when I will defend my bachelor thesis. Probably not for ever and it will be time when I feel I want to get a masters etc degree but not for now. I'm happy to get away from the system.

I am a person who never actually fit to the school system. Instead of doing my homework I have always asked - why can grown ups leave the office and go home and have a rest while children are expected to stay in school and continue doing homework after that.

That's one of the crucial flaws of the system - most of the real learning is meant to be done at home. In the classes and lectures the information is transformed but it has to be 'learned' at home. Biggest motivators for students to do it are difficult tests, exams and the grades you get for it. What a bullsh*t!

What if the only tool for teachers in school to motivate people to learn would be to make their subject as attractive as possible, so that students would actually voluntarely learn? And the only tasks that a teacher could give must be the ones that can be done during classes and not even give grades for that? Because the only grade would be your curiosity.

Right now the flow is simple: you learn hard, get good grades and you get a chance to learn even more (college). If you learn good there as well you get a good job. Good in sense it brings in more money (school=grades, work=money). What nice motivators?

What if it would look like this: you study hard because it's so damn interesting. That will give you chance to study even more because that will be even more damn interesting. And that will give you jobs that are damn interesting as well.

I believe in happiness where people are not guided by good marks and high salaries but about their gut feeling that says them what feels interesting, challenging and fun. Why not have schools like that and lose the official (=bad) motivators?

That will probably never happen, because it's always easy to say that "we are not ready for it" or "too many people are thinking differently". Maybe, but accepting what is not YOU is probably the worst thing that can happen to anybody.

Anyway Tartu University, thanks for the boring lectures that made me interested in communication, thanks for the bad marks for making me dislike formal motivators, thanks for teaching me that authority without respect is worthless, thanks for guiding me to a wonderful organization called AIESEC.

Right now I will also make a promise to myself: the only reason why you, Lauri Lahi, will go back to school some day, will be because you feel that it will be the most fascinating thing you can do at that time. No other reason allowed!