Delusions about education and how life works

Paul Romani

Coming to terms with the unpleasant truth that life has changed is the first step to admitting that your child needs a different kind of education

Every parent wants their child to receive a great education and go on to a happy and prosperous life. However, when it comes down to making decisions that will improve your child’s likelihood of achieving these things, many parents get cold feet.
Despite wanting a ‘better’ education for our children, we end up doing things more or less how our own parents did them.
The justification for this? “I did alright, so my kid will get the same.” We go from progressive to conservative in the blink of an eye. We cry out for private schools, many of which are stuck in the past providing conservative educations to conservative parents. Why is this, when we knew before becoming parents that that isn’t what our kids need.
Why? Because we are creatures of security.
Nevertheless, our fear of change is hurting children. LIFE IS CHANGING, whether you want to admit that or not. Doing things the same way isn’t working anymore!
There is a huge amount of evidence to prove this:

Since everyone is trying to achieve the same objective (i.e. studying the same subjects at university, getting high grades, etc.), there aren’t enough jobs for all graduates. This fact is currently affecting countries that put much more emphasis on higher education than Canada does, and the result is one of desperate unemployment for even young with masters degrees.
China produces 6 million graduates per year. “By 2030, China will have 200 million college graduates—more than the entire U.S. workforce.” How do we compete against that?
A career for life is a thing of the past.
Today’s youth often lack ambitions or any notion of what they want to be in life.
65% of our kids will end up in jobs that don’t exist yet.
Gone are the days of young people buying a house in Vancouver, considering the average house price is $1.2m and the down payment is $60,000!
Maintaining a middle-class lifestyle is becoming increasingly unaffordable, hence increasing debt, increasing numbers of Vancouverites living paycheck to paycheck, and the increasing dependence on credit cards.
Despite going to university, today’s youth face a future of downward mobility – Not up, not the same as you, but down.

Life has changed, yet despite all of our best intentions, our goals remain unchanged: go to school and get good grades; go to university, get good grades, and get a degree; get a job and work hard; save money and buy a house.
Likewise life has changed, yet education is essentially the same:

Subjects are taught separately
The 3Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) are still the most important focus of education
Subjects are ranked in order of importance (math, science, and English at the top), which ties in with the 3Rs
Schools and parents are obsessed with tests, not with higher-level intelligence (including the application of knowledge or creation of new ideas)
Knowledge of facts is the key objective, so classes must remain teacher centered, because subject teachers are generally the source of this subject-specific knowledge
Abstract skills (such as people skills, innovativeness, team building, entrepreneurship) are neither taught nor properly valued in education, because they are considered too subjective to grade

We need a reality check. Our kids cannot continue to be taught the same things that we learned when we went to school. If mainstream education continues to prioritize and value the knowledge of facts, then countries (like China, South Korea and India) that have higher populations and are much more demanding with young people in this area of education will obviously do better than us. It’s a losing battle trying to compete with the rote memory game, and it certainly isn’t a sign of higher intelligence to be able to memorize names, dates and formulas for a 3-hour exam.

Like parents, Pear Tree Education is obsessed with your kids succeeding and being happy in life. Our approach to achieving this goal is different, though.
Our kids need more, and they need something different that is relevant to life today. They need to learn things at a higher level of intelligence, which means learning to think, analyze, and create – not regurgitate facts!
Pear Tree provides something extra and extremely valuable that is critical to fully developing your child’s education. We do all of the things that schools don’t/can’t do, because we know what kids need to succeed both in and out of school.

If you want the right upgrade to your child’s education, come and visit us at Pear Tree Education. Once you visit us, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner!

If you think that we’re the only people in Vancouver that believe that mainstream education is inadequate for preparing your kids for real life, check out these videos: