Les écoles nous apprennent-elles tout ce que nous devons savoir? (document en anglais)

Do schools teach us everything we need to know?

In every culture around the planet, one of the most important pillars of society is education. It shapes the way in which a human is going to interact with the world and gives him the tools to deal with it. According to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “We are born weak, we need strength; we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgment. Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education”. Undoubtedly, most people associate education with schools since they are the first stage of a series of institutions dedicated to teaching. This essay examines the place of schools in society by analyzing whether these institutions teach us everything we need to know or not. This question has great importance, actually, we must know that people have been wondering how they should raise children to maximize their capacities since the beginning of History and, it is clear that schools play a major role in the process of learning. For the purposes of this essay it is imperative to assert that “everything we need to know” makes reference to the fact that we must know some things in order to reach happiness. We will first look at the advantages of an educational system in which schools play the main role and then we will see what are the disadvantages of a school-based system.

Nowadays, we are living on planet Earth with more than seven billion other people and over a billion of them live in extreme poverty. This is clearly something very difficult to manage with. Nevertheless, schools are an instrument that governments have reduce the levels of poverty by giving people the tools to get a job and reach economic independence and stability. This is certainly one of the main reasons why children sit still during hours and try as hard as possible to memorize what they are being taught. Apart from that, schools teach us how to perform practical activities such as reading, writing or solving mathematical problems. In addition to that, schools are a great mechanism to educate many children at the same time and, hence, it becomes the perfect place to develop social skills, which are crucial for the psychological health of these children.

Another consideration is that, even if people can now find almost any piece of information with books or the Internet, it has been proven that most people tend to learn faster and are more likely to remember lessons if they are in a scholar environment. In other words, factors such as having a timetable, sitting straight in front of a desk and competing with classmates have a great impact in the performance of the students. In conclusion, we may now declare that schools teach us a reasonable fraction of what we need to know to reach happiness because it is practical. Schools are fairly functional in the capitalistic system in which we live in.

However, it goes without saying that we learn from many sources different from school. In fact, these institutions aren’t meant to teach us everything we need to know. Fortunately, there are other entities that influence us; for instance, family usually teaches us moral values and society as a hole teaches us that life is unfair. Accordingly, we can affirm that school is not alone when it comes to teach us everything we need

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