our current education system sets us up for imposter syndrome

so i’m slowly working my way through the human current and i’m finding that i like the interview episodes the most. i’m currently digging into episode 011 with isaac morehouse and this one section around 11 minutes in.

there are show notes with a transcript so check that out for the verbatim language, but he (or maybe one of the show hosts?) said that our current education system sets people up for imposter sydrome. i totally agree.

there is this implicit assumption in the banking model of education (ht freire) that a student needs to learn a certain amount before acting on that knowledge… and that’s if they are expected to act on that knowledge at all! in primary and secondary education, we are just recipients of information and the most we are expected to do with it is answer questions on some test. in collegiate and graduate education, it gets both worse and better. although the path towards tenured faculty positions does include research (which, in some sense is acting on knowledge), doing project or implementation specific work seems to be frowned upon. in fact, spending too much time “doing” and not enough time researching (publishing) can be detrimental to earning tenure.

doing a bunch of information gathering without deeply integrating action along the way really does set us up for imposter syndrome. i can’t believe how many of my friends get into the work world and feel like they have fake it til they make it. maybe the banking model of education was valuable at some point (maybe), but in the modern world where information is available at almost everyone’s fingertips, moving around in the world without knowledge and experience seems foolish.

morehouse’s praxis school (which reminds me of alt-div school) is trying (like many other folks) to flip that assumption inside out and i think i’m into it.

more thoughts from this episode coming up…