Why You Should Skip Class: Group Conformity

“I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.” ― Edward Abbey

When I was young, I'd always listen to what adults told me to do because I had a strong belief that they knew best. But as I grew up, I learned about the people who changed the world and more often than not, they were those who would take risks and challenge the status quo. The way we do a lot of things in society is usually built upon the prior experience of those before us, and no doubt, there is an obvious merit to this. But is the status quo really the best way? Should we blindly settle with what worked fine in the past?

In thinking about learning, we need to put these questions into perspective. Sure, we can do what our institutions tell us and go to class, do the readings, and be a "good" student. But who's to say that we've reached the best methodology? Education has always been evolving, and one thing that hold us back is group conformity. The Asch Experiment is an illustration of how easy it is for us to settle down with what people tell us is the "right" way of doing things even if we might know otherwise.

Studying is Cheating

What is school really for?

All the way up through high school, I was known for saying the phrase "studying is cheating". It seemed to me that if the major occupation of our time as kids was to spend time in the classroom, then we should make the most of it. Exams, I thought, were all about evaluating long-term knowledge and skills. So what seemed strange to me was that all of my peers would go home and review/study/cram all the knowledge relating to a particular subject before a test.

This seemed absolutely absurd to me, because I always thought that school was for learning and home was for rest and play. And if people were always cramming last minute before an evaluation, then can we really say that the evaluation is a fair representation of meaningful long-term knowledge?

What I found was that most people (including many university students) often rely on rote learning rather than a full understanding of a subject matter. No doubt, this is helpful when you need to memorize some dates for a history test, but it can also remove the necessary mental component of critical thinking. So I had to ask, is school really a place of learning?