How School Failed Me
And a rallying cry for transforming the way we educate
Back in 6th grade, I had a weekly report card. I was given this weekly card because I was “disruptive.”
Looking back, I recognize that I wasn’t being challenged. I think my teachers and parents knew that as well. I always got good grades, was in honors classes, and was a good test taker. But I felt like most of my teachers didn’t like me. Class felt boring, so I spent my time trying to entertain myself and my peers. I prided myself on making my classmates laugh. My teachers weren’t laughing.
So eventually, I was given this weekly report card. We had 9 periods of class per day. Every Friday, I had to hand this report card to each of my teachers, for them to give me a behavioral grade for the week. This had nothing to do with my knowledge or grasp of what was being taught. It was purely about, “Did Brian follow the rules this week?” “Did Brian sit still?” “Was Brian disruptive?”
As you might imagine, this weekly report card became part of my middle school identity. Very few people knew I had a weekly report card. But that didn’t make me feel special. It made me feel broken – like there was something wrong with me. And I needed extra measures to fit in. Around the same time that I was given this weekly report card, I was diagnosed with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and put on a medication called Concerta.
Despite my antics as class clown, I was actually a pretty shy kid who struggled with self-confidence. Concerta dialed up my inhibitions and caused me to overthink everything. It was harder to make friends. I rarely felt like myself. I experienced anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts – which I think is more common among kids than we adults realize.
But I was no longer disruptive - yay! My grades improved. The weekly report card became a thing of the past. My parents had less headaches and worries about whether I would get into a good college and become a productive member of society. I coasted through the rest of middle school, and straight out of high school, got into the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
In college, I traded in my Concerta for Adderall – simply because Adderall was easier to abuse. I’ll leave it at that.
After college, I fully stopped taking ADD medication – haven’t taken it in 12 years.
Reflecting on My Experience & The System We Accept
As an adult, I’ve learned a thing or two about the factory model education system – where kids are treated like products on an assembly line, moving through a one-size-fits-all process, that prepares them to work on said assembly line. In this process, kids that don’t fit in – kids with different backgrounds, different privileges, and different ways of thinking – are forced to fall in line. Either through a weekly report card, parent-teacher conferences, overscheduling to the point of exhaustion and burnout, medication, or some combination of all the above.
As the former teacher and EDUpreneur, Ana Lorena Fabrega, famously said:
When kids who think and behave differently are told that the way they think and behave is wrong, their innate strengths are suppressed. Creativity is crushed. They learn to wear masks that hide their perceived-to-be-broken essence and enable them to be accepted by the truly broken systems we inhabit. Many kids never take these masks off, wearing them to the grave. Underneath the mask, a human filled with regret is left wondering, “What if…?”
I’m grateful that I’ve experienced certain life-altering events that empowered me to take my masks off:
Getting to go to camp for 7 weeks every summer, spending time in nature, where I didn’t have to take my ADD medication, and was accepted as my authentic self.
Diving into opportunities to travel, experience new cultures, and meet new people during and shortly after college. I’ve found that experiencing yourself in different environments is a great way to develop deeper levels of self-understanding, because you get to see yourself outside of the context you grew up in.
Being confronted head on with the reality of death. When my dad died a year after I graduated from college, I realized that life is too short to live someone else’s life.
Becoming an entrepreneur, rediscovering my innate creativity that had atrophied during my time in the factory education system, and learning from people like James Altucher and Adam Grant that creativity is a muscle that can be exercised and developed through practice.
Now, at the tender age of 34, I consider myself a creative – my art is experiences. And making art is more fun than it’s ever been.
I’m so grateful for every aspect of my journey, because it’s all contributed to the man I’ve become. But not everyone is this lucky.
How do we want to educate our kids - and ourselves?
The way we educate our kids today will determine the way we all live in the future, when those kids are the ones running the world. And the way we educate is broken.
Or maybe - the way we educate is ripe for disruption.
We can’t continue to use a system that educates kids to be productive members of an industrial society, when we no longer live in an industrial society. We’re in an emergent world, filled with uncertainty. The future of humanity can be very bright, or very dark. Frankly, it will probably be somewhere in between. But I know that how we educate our kids – and ourselves – is perhaps the most important responsibility we have.
Do we want to develop citizens who are going to fall in line and follow orders to keep the machine running?
Or do we want to develop smart, thoughtful, self-aware, creative, empathetic, mindful citizens and systems, who care deeply making the world better for all of us?
If we were to build a new education system from scratch, with all the knowledge, resources, and experience we’ve gained over the last 150 years using this factory model + 200,000 years of human evolution + our knowledge of the modern world – what might we create?