How School Makes Kids Less Intelligent | Eddy Zhong #podcast #ted #youth #tedtalk #english #speech

I want to share with you a big secret today and it is not one at the same time, it is so important that the secret is this. If I told you, you would have

less

doubt as to how it could be possible. When children go to

school

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

intelligent

, how come they become

less

intelligent

? What I'm talking about? Well, I hope to illustrate that to you today, before I turned 14, I was a kid who didn't know what I wanted in Usually, when you come to a five or six year old and ask him what you want to be when you grow up, he tells you that I am 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 just listened to my parents almost 100 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 me. of his son, so go to

school

, keep up your grades, go out and exercise once every few years and I was trying my best to ask and make up for the problem was that he wasn't even that good in school, terrible at science, um, I couldn't.

Write a five paragraph essay if my life had depended on it and to this day I still think I'm the only Asian kid in the world who doesn't understand math but I really do understand it but when I turned 14 everything changed and I don't anymore. It was this hot air balloon floating in space, now I was on the supersonic plane flying towards my destination at about 50,000 miles per hour or however fast those things go, and this whole change started when I got an envelope in the mail, it was a invitation not to a birthday party. I didn't get any of those, not to a playground, but to a business plan competition in Boston and I was curious.

I was so curious that I had to go and the director of the program explained to us that in the end For five months we would form a team, develop a business idea and present it to a panel of judges who would judge us. You know how good our suits are and how good the business ideas were. Long story short, during those five months I formed the team developed an idea, we actually ended up winning that competition and taking home a check, and that event sparked my interest in going to more and more competitions of this type and over the next two years of my life, in fact, I attended dozens and dozens of these. competitions and I was winning almost all of them um and I realized that I really liked going to them 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 What the What team did differently than our other competitors each time was that, while everyone was coming up and presenting their idea and their PowerPoint, we were going to Home Depot and buying supplies and actually building the idea that we were talking about and the judges were so impressed. because of the fact that a bunch of teenagers could go and create things, they could prototype minimally viable products and we won almost every competition simply because the judges loved that we had started and executed in one of these competitions, I met a man bad tempered A middle-aged Polish guy named Frank and if he's here today he better run after this.

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 that we, when we were 16, went out into the world of a real hardware technology startup and at first we were all like Steve Jobs, let's build Apple out of school now, but we quickly realized that we don't is so easy. Don't quit 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 as students we couldn't go to bars to network.

We don't attend networking events for adults so we went to our school and organized this little presentation in our Auditorium where we would present their idea, hopefully the

kids

would join our team and we sent out an invitation to our entire school the first thing we did. we did. What I noticed is that almost no one showed up, there was almost no interest and the ones that showed up spread the rumor around the school and throughout that week they made fun of us, made fun of us for our ideas and for being Mark Zuckerberg wannabes, um and what is it.

The funny thing is that the next week, after we did the exact same presentation and we did it at our elementary school, the

kids

who were five or six years younger and the response was phenomenal, these kids were throwing their lunch money at us asking if They could buy a prototype. asking for our pre-money assessment, 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 say some of these words and that just inspired me. a lot and I think this is what our education system has done in just these five or six years in the education system these creative kids have become these teenagers who are not willing to think outside the box so let's get back to that secret that was Talking about how school may be making kids less intelligent is much more than just one type of and, while school can make you smarter academically, it can teach you physics, algebra, calculus, it is decreasing intelligence. creativity of the children you are teaching.

Making them think that a certain way to follow a certain path in life is telling them to go to high school, get it, go to a good college, find a stable job and if you don't you won't be successful right, how am I? ? Even being here today, how could I, a C student, start 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 founded by Harvard or Stanford graduates? It must be something that cannot be measured by academic intelligence alone, so this is what I believe that parents, teachers, educators, 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 job to be successful, not enough people are telling kids to explore more possibilities to become entrepreneurs. and if there is a message that I want parents, children and all of you to take away from what I have said here today that you can open your own doors that you can deviate from this limited and narrow conventional path that education places us on you can diverge and create your own future you can start your own companies and start your own non-profit organizations you can create yourself we can innovate if there is one message that I want you to take away from everything I have said is that no one has changed the world by doing what the world tells them has said to do.