Unlearning

Schools should have taught us about a lot of things: law, managing money, doing taxes, budgeting, nutrition, negotiation, communication… the list goes on.

Worse even, schools not only didn’t teach us useful things, they taught us things that we now have to unlearn.

I remember when they asked us to choose our career path. We were fourteen years old. Fourteen! We had a so-called “career day” where we were given two-page descriptions of the most common professions: doctor, nurse, police officer, teacher, programmer. Guess if “writer” or “artist” were on the list.

There were possible income brackets and schools you needed to finish for each profession. And they asked you to choose one. This kind of narrow thinking and conforming to social pressures is one of the major things that everyone should unlearn. That’s a huge topic, and I will write more about it later.

But for now, there’s one other thing that school taught us wrong — writing. We were asked to write so many essays, and yet most of us can’t write a compelling article on any topic — and it’s not a surprise. We were judged on criteria such as length of work and the number of arguments that we presented. Adding adjectives — a bad practice — was an acceptable way of making your writings longer, and teachers encouraged it.

No wonder we can’t write concisely and clearly. Schools didn’t teach us that, they taught us the opposite. We have to unlearn what we know, and then learn to write well ourselves. That’s one of the reasons why I started this blog, and you should too. If you want to write better, you need to practice often, and starting a blog helps establish a habit of daily writing.