Education & Curiosity

You're probably at the age where you've been in school for a while and might be wondering "what's this all about really?"

So here are a few thoughts about why education is so important and why your mum and I will unapologetically push you to make the most of every learning opportunity.

First and foremost, education is the one thing no one can take away from you. It remains with you for life and under every circumstance. The kind of education your mum and I will try and provide you with, will be designed to equip you with as much knowledge as possible to build the kind of life you wish to lead.

To do this, we will try and help you to succeed in the best schools we can find.

On a purely practical level, school is where you learn about how this world works - it would be a bit unfair to expect everyone to just work it all out as they go along! As a community, we want kids and young people to get similar lessons in what you might call "general knowledge". As you get older, this becomes more specialised towards specific areas, and once you leave school, you tend to specialise even further.

Schools are also a turbo-charged sociel environment where you learn to deal with a wide variety of personalities and make some great friends along the way. It's not uncommon that many of the relationships you make in school will be around for a long time (and thankfully, some will not!).

It may not be obvious every day, but it's important to always try your best and achieve the highest marks possible. Whether we like it or not, school grades have become a default sorting mechanism for capability and competence as you grow up.

Now, I'm not saying that succeeding academically is the only way to get ahead in life, there are plenty of smart people who didn't do well in school, BUT getting very good grades does open up opportunities that may help you create a great life. So it's worth trying to maximise what you get out of your compulsory time at school.

Beyond marks, many of the topics you study will be incredibly interesting and useful forever. So regardless of academic attainment, do your brain a favour by feeding it all the most interesting information you can - you will be amazed at how much it can take!

Having said all that, a couple of things to remember:

You are not going to be good at everything. I'm sure you probably realise this already, but it's worth repeating. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, and while you should always try your best with new subjects (you never know where your talents will lie), eventually you will learn to lean into your strengths.

Learning is for life. While school takes up a large part of your life at the moment, actually the most important think you are learning is how to learn. How to tackle problems, how to take on new information and fit it in with everything else you know, how to take on new information that challenges you or that you disagree with.

Developing these sorts of skills allows us to keep learning throughout our life. Which is what keeps life exciting and new!

Curiosity is the best teacher. The single best thing you can do to help yourself learn is to stay curious. No one knows everything, and the smartest people are always asking themselves "Why?" or "Is that true?" or "I wonder what's really going on here?". Never think you know everything about a topic, approach everything as if you were a beginner.

If you are anything like me when I was a kid, this post will make you groan. There are no shortcuts to your time in school - it will be hard, at times it will be boring and the world is full of assholes. But it is an important time in your life and we will do everything we can to help you squeeze every bit of opportunity from those years - we'll even try to help make it fun ;)