How school makes kids less intelligent Eddy Zhong TEDxYouth@BeaconStreet

I want to share with you a big secret today and it's not one that many of you want to hear, but at the same time it's so important that I have to tell you that secret is this. What if I told you that every single day children go to

school

become

less

intelligent

now, how could it be possible? When children go to

school

they learn things well and accumulate more knowledge, then if anything they should become more

intelligent

, how could they become

less

intelligent? What I'm talking about? Well, I hope to illustrate that to you today, before I turned fourteen, I was a kid who didn't know what I wanted in life, so usually when you get to a five or six year old kid and ask them what you want.

Be when you grow up he will say an astronaut or a businessman I wanted to be a professional Call of Duty player and since I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up I only listened to my parents almost one hundred percent of the time I trusted that , they knew what was best for me, my parents wanted from me what any typical parent would want from their child, so go to school, keep up your grades, go out and exercise once every few years and I'm trying to do everything possible to ask myself, except the problem was that I wasn't even that good at school, I was terrible at science, I couldn't write a five paragraph essay if my life had depended on it, and to this day I'm still thinking I'm the only Asian kid in the world who doesn't understand math.

I really do, but when I turned fourteen, everything changed. It was no longer this hot blue air floating in space. Now I was like a supersonic plane flying towards my destination. 50,000 miles per hour or how fast those things go and this change it all started when I received an envelope in the mail it was an invitation not to a birthday party I didn't get any of those not for a playground but for a planning competition business I was in Boston and I was so curious that I had to go and the director of the program explained to us that for five months we would form a team, develop a business idea and present it to a panel of judges who would judge. us and you know how good our suits are and how good a business idea was and long story short, during those five months I built the team, developed an idea and we ended up winning that competition and taking home a check and that one from they.

It sparked my interest in going to more and more competitions of this type and for the next two years of my life I attended dozens and dozens of these competitions and I was winning almost all of them and I realized that I really liked going to them. a lot not only because I liked winning them, but also because I had an unrealized passion and that was the passion for creating things because the only thing that my team did different from our other competitors every time was that while everyone went up and presented their idea and their PowerPoint We were going to Home Depot to buy supplies and build the idea that we were talking about and the judges are so impressed by the fact that a group of teenagers can go and create things and can prototype them in a minimally viable way. products and we won almost every competition just because the judges loved that we got to go and perform in one of these competitions.

I met a short-tempered middle-aged Polish guy named Frank and if he's here today he better run after this and he came up to us and took a look at our prototype and said, I can help you turn this into a real company. Think about that, it's not so cool, we have 16 year old

kids

going out into the world to create real hardware. tech startup and at first we all thought it was time to be Steve Jobs, let's build Apple by dropping out of school now, but we quickly realize that you know it's not that easy so don't drop out unless you're really sure You have a good idea, but we realized that the first part of building a great company is building a great team and we students couldn't go to bars to network, we couldn't go to adult networking events, so we went to our school and we set up this little presentation in our auditorium where we would present their idea and hopefully the

kids

would join our team and we sent out an invitation to our entire school the first thing we noticed is that almost no one showed up, there was almost no interest and The ones who showed up, spread the rumor around the school and during that week they marked us, they made fun of us for our ideas and for wanting to be Mark Zuckerberg and the funny thing is that the next week we took the exact same presentation and we did it. at our elementary school, two kids who were five or six years younger and the response was phenomenal, these kids were throwing our lunch money at us asking if they could buy our prototype, they were asking us for our pre-money evaluation, which I know you guys know. from watching Shark Tank, but it was amazing that these kids knew that terms like that existed when they were too young to probably even say some of these words and then justice, that inspired me so much and I think this is what our education system has done In just these five or six years in the education system, these creative children have become teenagers who are not willing to think outside the box, so let's go back to the secret I was talking about: how is it possible that school is making children less intelligent?

The fact is that there is much more than just one type of intelligence and while school can make you smarter academically, it can teach you physics, algebra, calculus, it is diminishing children's creative intelligence, it is teaching them to think in a certain way to descend in a certain way. The path in life is to tell you: go to high school, get a diplomat, go to a good university, find a stable job and if you don't, you won't be successful and if that were true, how am I here today? I'm a C student and I started a tech company at the age of 16 and how is my company, which was featured in The Wall Street Journal last week, doing better than some of the companies started by Harvard or Stanford grads? ?

It must be something that cannot be measured by academic intelligence alone, so this is what I believe: parents, teachers, educators, you have the power to influence and inspire young people. The fact is, there are too many people right now who are obsessed with telling kids to go to college to find a good career. work to be successful, there aren't enough people telling kids to explore more possibilities to become entrepreneurs, and if there's one message I want parents, kids, and all of you to take away from what I've said here today, it's that can open their own doors that you can get directly out of this conventional, limited and narrow path that education places us on, you can diverge and create your own future, you can start your own companies and your own non-profit organizations, you can create, You can innovate and if there is a message, I want you to draw conclusions from everything I have said.

It's just that no one has changed the world by doing what the world has told them to do. Thank you.