School Needs to Change: My Ideas for Better Education
It’s impossible to ignore how outdated our education system is here in Portugal. I’ve mentioned it in other articles: school is still set up for students who are good at memorizing and can perform well in front of an audience, especially in oral assessments. Since forever, teachers have told us, “You need to know this because it’s on the test.” I’ve never heard, “You need to know this because it’s actually useful in real life.” Never. Always “this is on the test or the exam” and “you don’t need to know that because it’s not on the test.” The result? There’s no incentive for students to actually learn. They memorize just to be graded and then they can forget. Another problem is that we talk about the same things for 12 years. Just look at History: from Year 5 to Year 9, we repeat the material twice - the first time focusing on memorizing dates and names (like that’s going to stick with us for years!) and the second time just slightly more in-depth. It makes no sense. If we...
