When I applied to college as a budding senior in high school, I wrote in my personal statement that I wished to become a teacher. After finishing my masters, I wrote about desiring to be a university level educator in my PhD statement of purpose. I attended a teaching seminar this past week, where we debunked the traditional school system, and I realized that merely teaching in higher education wasn’t going to build growth-minded, critically-thinking humans.

Education has been the cornerstone of my motivations, but traditional learning and the school system is failing. Maybe Peter Thiel was right: the school system is murdering student creativity, motivation, and critical thinking.

Research has consistently proved that active learning increases learning in STEM fields, such as utilizing a flipped-classroom style of teaching versus the traditional lecture. Other techniques are as follows:

Case-Based and Problem-Based Learning: These involve students working in groups to solve real-world problems/cases. It encourages the application of theoretical knowledge to practical scenarios, which enhances retention and the ability to recall information.

Peer Instruction: Peer instruction involves students explaining concepts to each other after an initial presentation by the instructor.

An additional aid to learning is metacognition, or thinking about how we learn. Research performed in 2009 by Finley et al. showed that learners who actively engaged in self-monitoring were more likely to identify and correct their misunderstandings, leading to improved retention and recall.

So we’ve confirmed: the non-traditional classroom is most conducive to actual learning. The resources to implement active learning are there. Why, then, do traditional lecture-style courses constitute the majority of what classes at higher education institutes look like?

Think about how you think. There’s always a wider application to most problems, and this one taught me that I am both my student and my teacher. What am I teaching myself when I feel unmotivated and seek a dopamine hit from dessert consumption? What am I teaching myself when I mentally berate an effort I made in “vain”? What invisible rules am I following, and what rules have I self-imposed that do not exist? These automatic feelings and thoughts about my actions, if not challenged and reflected upon, will dictate the quality and trajectory of my life.

The current higher-ed school system is a business focused on increasing sales (student attendance). Do you buy in? What are your goals? We’re not just talking about students in school anymore.