Vishen LakhianiFounder of Mindvalley | NYT Bestselling Author | Transforming Lives Globally

Why Our Education System Is Total Bullsh*t

6 Apr 2020 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:55

A short YouTube talk (Vishen Lakhiani with a second speaker) criticizing the current higher-education model as outdated, expensive, and misaligned with fast technological and economic change. Lakhiani argues many jobs will disappear within a decade, college is a poor investment that leaves graduates in debt and unhappy, and education should teach broader life competencies beyond narrow skill sets. The second speaker concurs that formal education meets only ~30–50% of children's needs and that parents likewise lack training to teach these broader capacities; both promote alternative models (e.g., Mindvalley/Mind Valley University) and risk-taking to reimagine education.

Chapters

45% of jobs today are going to disappear in 10 years. The idea of the four year college to me is rubbish. It belongs in the trash bin of history. You cannot take a group of people who are 19 or 20 or 21 and put them in a bubble for four years and guess what? Four years. When they emerge from that bubble, the world has changed. The world is changing so fast that between 2016 and 2022, Singularity University says that we're going to see as much change as between 1900 and 2000. That change is accelerating. Gallup says that 54% of Americans dislike their jobs. So what kind of world are we building where our kids are having to spend so much money, especially in the US to get an education, only to go take a job that the majority of them dislike? The system is broken. Look at what's happening in America today, where education today has become such a for profit enterprise that young Americans start out their adult lives in massive debt for a bullshit piece of paper that very likely is going to mean nothing ten years from now. This is what we want to disrupt.
While I respect our educational system, I think that it only satisfies 40%, 30%, maybe on a good day, 50% of what our children need. And you know, some would argue that, well, it's not the job of the educational system to do it, that's the job of parents to do it. But I think parents only teach what they've been taught. They need to learn ways in which they can enhance their life, not a particular intellect or a skill set. How to fix a car, how to perform law, how to be a doctor, that's a skill set. There's so much more to my life than my skill set Mind Valley University. It has a lot of risk. But until you're willing to risk it all, you can never gain it all. If you want to gain big, you risk big.