Students Unable to Thrive in Traditional Educational Settings

Relatively unimportant post, skippable. Things I indicate in the beginning of every post. Ideas are important, but I don't elaborate, and now I have much greater clarity on why these problems I've described in this post exist, why I perceive them as problems while others don't (I'm an Aspie) and how they can be solved. It's more of a rant but you could see it as describing the problem accurately. Not too lengthy, unlike most of my posts. For a detailed treatment of these topics check out my posts 'World's Most Selective University' and 'Confessions'.

I was, and still am, told my many elders that I’m too young for the things I’m learning and ambitions I have, that I should only study what I am taught and at least wait till my final year to pursue all the research and startup projects I wish to get started with as soon as possible.

But now I have learned not to pay any regard to them (unless they provide me with good logical reasons, which they haven’t) because I’m now confident in my own abilities and interests, and firmly believe that age and credentials are not, and should not, be a barrier for a motivated person to pursue their dreams and ambitions.

I recently had a conversation with an influential person with an important role at my university who asked me the same question, and I talked about the contrast between the environment in the USA and India, how age is not correlated with or a reliable predictor of ability and ambition, how I have a strong desire to investigate the topics I like and find solutions to the questions I am interested in, and that there are people much older who have no ambition and just wish to sustain themselves with a job and that’s perfectly fine but this one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t respect individual differences in abilities and interests, the outdated traditional curriculum and education system, and the pervading mindset and preconceived notions of what is and isn’t possible shouldn’t stifle the motivation of the driven students.

By the end of the conversation, I was successfully able to change his mind, and he commented that I’m not too early but actually too late. I wish more people in the society to be as open-minded and receptive to new ideas as that person, willing to change their mind in face of convincing and logical arguments and evidence conflicting with their existing worldview. It’d be even better if they were just as humble to be able to admit they were wrong and their old beliefs were flawed.

I also know two people who initially faced backlash from the society due to being too young and trying to start some ambitious projects, and both of them were able to keep at it in the face of all discouragement and are now doing quite well with their successful projects.

One decided to leave a prestigious Indian university for another one abroad for the more supportive environment and has no regrets, and the other is about five years younger than me and is already leading multiple international organizations related to science communication and spreading awareness about important social causes. And guess where he plans to study after school? Not in India, I'll just tell you that much. And people wonder the reasons behind the rise in brain-drain and all talent leaving the country.

Why is this important, and why do I care? Speaking from personal experience, it is very rare to find like-minded people who share the same drive or values as you, and so it is also reasonable to think that it’s easier for such people to be influenced by the society and get discouraged and feel they’re wrong and the society is right even when that’s not the case because it is very possible that large groups of people are wrong and you’d never know unless you test those ideas by trying to find evidence to the contrary using empirical evidence and date using the scientific method.

If such students are discouraged and not allowed to pursue their passion and given the support they need to flourish, it is going to be disastrous both for them and the society as they won’t be able to contribute as much as they could have only if they’d been in the right environment and provided with the right support and opportunities.

They’re also more prone to feel lonely and that it’s them who are mistaken because they’re so few, so it’s essential to build a community of like-minded people who wish to connect with other people who share similar interests, values and goals, something I’m planning to address soon with a new project of mine.

Those who feel like the system is holding them back and they could do much better on their own self-directed goal-oriented learning through all the support and information available on the net and people they can contact in today’s interconnected world, and those who think that what’s taught in the educational institutions is irrelevant to the near future and doesn’t teach the kind of thinking and life skills one would expect, and ought to learn in such places.

I realized early on that it’d be unwise to depend on the educational institutions to educate me, and since then I’ve always actively tried to learn outside of classroom. Not just topics, but from all my experiences and every new source of information I encounter, and also a framework to best process the information and extract the essential lessons in a way that’s suited to my learning style and future aspirations.

The opportunity cost of committing to a system you don’t wish to be a part of is really high, and many young people might not realize this but time is the most valuable resource they have, and it’d determine what kind of person they’re going to be and what sort of impact they could have on society in the near future, and more broadly how well they are able to steer their life in the direction they wish to take.

For instance, I aspire to be someone who works on topics that still aren’t very well established and combine fields that currently don’t have too many professionals working on in a way that I wish to combine them and solve problems that we are still no closer to solving despite all the advancement in scientific progress over the last few decades. I am also not one to depend on my intuitions, so I have tested them with a framework as close to the scientific method as I could come up with, and based them in empirical evidence that I can’t refute even if my intuitions suddenly change tomorrow.

In this way any decision I make would be based on evidence and not just by blindly following my intuitions, and I would never regret them because I believe that a decision must be judged by all the information and restraints you had at the time when you made it, so even if things don’t turn out as planned, it’ll be irrational to regret the decision. Any sense of doubt in my abilities and interests would also be negated by the data I have form the real world, my past experiences, achievements, and the people and professionals I have talked to, so I can never be fully certain (No one ever can, due to the inherent epistemic uncertainty that plagues all of science and our own cognitive constraints, and if you are, it means no evidence can change your mind and you’ve fallen prey to ideology and that’s unscientific and irrational and conflicts with the principle of open-mindedness, one of the strongest pillars of the scientific method.)

Coming back to the main topic, I wish to be the sort of person with skills and knowledge that I fail to see the education system providing me with in the near future, and I only have a rough idea of what I want to be, but it’s definitely not one of the traditional conventional roles that currently exist in society, and even though I have people whom you could call role models, I am fascinated by different aspects of their career and personality and I wish to forge my own path because I’m a unique individual who must not mold themselves according to someone else’s path or by the influence of the society I happen to be in, especially when I’m aware of all such influences and pitfalls.

And that is what society today requires. This isn’t encouraged or even talked about, at least I have never heard of nay such thing, but I think that we need more creative and driven people who wish to have a novel interdisciplinary skillset to solve some of the most long-standing and hard problems in science and the most pressing societal issues. Tying it all back to where I started, all this can be achieved regardless of age and credentials, and the society must be more accommodating of such students and their aspirations.

Speaking of something I'm currently going through- Without going into too many details, I've come up with some unconventional plans and once again I'm trying to make a rational decision by evaluating my alternatives, and make a calculated risk with eyes wide open to all the possible scenarios, so even if things don't turn out as expected, I don't regret it because a decision is judged by all the information I had at the time I made it, and it would be a good decision regardless of the outcome, which is influenced by several external factors out of my direct control.

So after evaluating all the pros and cons as well as the best and worst case scenarios of every possible alternative, it has ultimately come down to my intuition, risk-taking ability and the trade-offs I'm willing to make, depending on my values and priorities. I really wish that these things could be formalized in a logical or mathematical language but unfortunately they can't. Hopefully in the near future.

It's situations like these when I wish I had that perfectly rational AI system that I am planning to start working on that uses all the principles of Rationality and decision science in a mathematical form to work out the most optimal decision in any situation but that'll take a fair amount of time. I'd like to develop such a system sometime in the near future.

For anyone thinking I'm overanalyzing the situation and applying logic where it doesn't work, here's my reply: Indeed sometimes it is best to follow your heart, also called intuition, but despite all the existing literature on cognitive biases, it's still uncertain when and when not it's best to rely on intuitions. We're still far from understanding the situations where intuitions could be relied upon to guide out decision-making, and the stakes are too high for the decision I'm making right now, plus I've also learnt from some mistakes I've made in the past for a similar event, and all the flawed decision making processes and environmental pressure I succumbed to. So it's just the rational thing to do that I learn from my past experiences and don't repeat the same mistakes.

I'm not sure how accurate my internal decision-making compass or intuition is, so I'm trying to rely on my logical and language skills to articulate everything that's going on in my mind to try to make some sense out of it and process it more consciously and rationally.

So it is rational to depend on your heart in some instances, and it's not in others, and the stakes are too high in some situations that require you use your rational mind more fully than other situations, and the fact that your heart has guided you in the past is not a reliable indicator of how well it'll guide you in the future, or how well my heart will guide me, but it's irrational to set such high standards for your heart and judge it despite the fact that absolute certainty is impossible to attain and you can never prove what's the best course of action but only collect evidence pointing you towards the right direction.

But yes I'm also kind of lunatic and been called eccentric by my peers so it's understandable if you share their opinion; I just derive a sort of inherent pleasure by making calculated risks and analyzing a situation to find out the most rational decision, as well as thinking of the ways of thinking by which I could make the most optimal decision in any given circumstance. So you do you until I start working on that better version of a nuclear reactor or undetectable and instantly fatal biohazard I'm planning to work on, when your objections would be a bit more reasonable.

PS: Here I am typing this rant on the system once again neglecting my academic commitments, but I see it more like describing the problem more fully so that we can come up with a solution to address all the issues completely. But I think it's an acceptable trade-off; what use is a system that doesn't prepare students for the real world and exists for the sole purpose of turning them into mindless unquestioning automatons who are not allowed to discover their talents and realize their full potential?

Moreover, I know that there must be other students who are unable to thrive in the traditional education system and feel uncertain about their own abilities or interests due to being gaslit by the society or any of the reasons I listed above. If you are such a person, I’d love to connect with you, so feel free to reach out!