In my experience, schools teach kids what to think and never really teach them how to think. Critical thinking skills are something that I have struggled with. I was usually really good at the memorization aspect which allowed me to do pretty fucking well in school, but when I hit teenage and started to question everything and started to recognize all of the lies that we’ve been taught to believe. For example the gigantic Thanksgiving lie (look into it if you are unaware) and we still celebrate this atrocity…unreal.
Did you ever notice that we have been programmed since we were small children to be a cog in the machinery? We were trained to get up Monday morning and go to school for about 8 hours a day for 5 days and then when all of that was done we were able to have fun on the weekend and then start the whole process over. Most of us live this way or a slightly modified version of this for our entire lives when hopefully we were smart enough to save $300,000 dollars or more so that we can then try to have the freedom we were born to have when we are old and near dying instead of starting a business that didn’t require us to be there most of the time to make the thing bring in cash at an early age in order to live the life we want while we are young enough to enjoy it.
Get these kids used to being good little sheeple that stay in line and raise their hand when they want to speak. Then convince them that going 10s of thousands or more in debt to get a good education in a field that will make them want to slit their own throat in a few years is a great idea. Then they can go into deeper debt to buy a nice car to up their image game so that they can find a pretty wife or handsome husband. Then get them pregnant and into a house that they have to go even deeper into debt to have room for the new baby. Cog in the machine. We keep chasing our tail working to keep paying off the debt that we didn’t need to get into in the first place.
We were never taught that scrimping and saving to invest in 401k and some mutual funds for 50 years might end up leaving you in the same position as you would have been if you buried the money in a hole in your backyard due to the rate of inflation and volatility in the market.
How do we teach our kids and ourselves to innovate rather than follow the crowd?
Trying to navigate outside of the mainstream isn’t an easy thing to do. Sometimes you just have to get out and start something, fail and do it again until you succeed.