Minimalistic Approach To Education 😎

Most of you probably know what minimalism stands for — getting rid of useless and impractical stuff that doesn’t improve one’s life. So, for minimalists owning less is the answer to a better and happier existence. But what most people tend to do? We tend to hang on to things just in case we’ll need them someday…Some mysterious and vast majority of the time never coming day.

This concept doesn’t revolve around only material things, it can be applied to every aspect of our lives, and education is no exception. In this article we’ll talk about the problems that education is facing in terms of information overload and how minimalism can be applied to studying and make it more effective, useful and resultative.

😵 Information overload in education

The education system is flawed and it’s no secret. The most important things we’ve learned at school, for example, was how to read, write and count, all the rest just wasn’t that important and therefore it was forgotten. Most schools, colleges and other educational institutions require from students to simply memorise facts (and very often outdated facts) for different tests, and of course that information will certainly be erased because there’s always another test and a full load of new facts to memorize. So students start to follow a kind of machinery process of a constant input and output of data which never gets a chance to stick. We’re becoming slaves who undergo commands, simply the temporary vessels that are being filled with information just to transport it once and be empty again.

No wonder we can’t become efficient at anything in particular. The amount of content in our education is huge, in a crazy curriculum we’re being packed with text from multiple textbooks, workbooks, visuals and lesson notes consisting of elaborate details from various small parts of different disciplines. And most of this stuff has no value for our lives and goals. So not only current standards are hard to meed, they are useless and take a toll on the students’ mental health.

Obviously any educational system has a hard time determining what students need to learn, but by focusing on everything at once it becomes too heavy. From this point of view more is not better, it actually blurs the picture when it should give a clearer image. And it doesn’t give any power to change the situation not to teachers, nor students

😲 How minimalism can impact education

There’s no need to undermine the importance of education. Without it there will be no progress and no means to reach success. But we have to develop a smart approach to it, if we actually want to achieve something. This is where minimalism comes in. It’s all about the efficiency, spareness, refinement and simplicity. We have to deliberately cut all the unnecessary and go through the basics building structures without memorizing thousands of facts.

For example, if you’re learning Python, JavaScript, or any other coding language for that matter, you don’t really have to memorize every goddamn function or endless lines of code in order to actually learn how to code. And you don’t actually have to know the history behind its development (well, you can be curious and check it out, it’s always up to you of course). But the point I’m trying to make here is that to learn programming, you need to focus on the basics, get a deeper and clearer understanding of how everything works, and cultivate the ability of finding all of the other stuff (the lines of code you need for your program, the opinion of other more experienced programmers, the tools to solve some problems you might have, the needed functions etc.) from the resources you have. It’s all about pin-pointing the most relevant facts and practicing them.

“Productivity is directly proportional to your ability to eliminate unnecessarily.”

― Sukant Ratnakar

We all have the tendency to create chaos within us, taking on too much at once. But to really learn we have to commit to one thing — absorbing only the information that serves us, that is useful on the path to what we invision of achieving. And one of our responsibilities is to consciously determine what’s irrelevant and have the courage to ditch it. The point is not to know a lot, but to create more complex connections (associations) between the different pieces of information and continuously practice to use that information. Our brain just doesn’t care for something we don’t use. Knowledge must be applied! That structure of data you’re building, it has to be operational, the wheels need to be constantly turning.

“Less is more. Progress is made through precise, persistent, and purposeful pushes.”

― Scott Perry

Let’s put it in perspective. Here are some small tips for students and for teachers just to map it all out a bit.

👉🏻 Notes for students:

• Build your self-discipline by learning and practicing every day.
• Really care and have passion about what you’re learning, remind yourself why you need it and envision the endgame, this way the motivation will stay with you.
• Outline and write down the main points, and discard what is useless to you and the goal you’ve set for yourself.
• Make deliberate associations for every important piece of information (make it personal and memorable).
• Learn how to efficiently use additional resources, like Internet (virtual libraries) and other people’s experience.

👉🏻 Notes for teachers:

• Focus on covering fewer topics, but make sure that students get a much deeper understanding.
• Ditch multiple presentations and visuals and prepare more direct instructions.
• Get students to practice specific knowledge, but try not to be strong-headedly focused on getting the only correct answers to certain problems or on the only particular ways of approaching problems. If a student has the argumentation and the creative path to solving the task, it’s very often far more valuable than simply getting the fixed result using fixed standards. Noone gets recognition by blindly following everybody else’s beliefs and guides, so your student may be wrong according to current public knowledge, like saying that the planet is flat, but if he has the argumentation and well-structured train of thought, it deserves encouragement.
• Choose fewer activities, but cover the most relevant ones in depth.
• Analyze your students needs.
• Don’t forget about personal development. Learning never ends and even the sky is not the limit.

And the greatest advice to all:

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”

- Thomas Henry Huxley

Don’t get stuck. You can be a naturally curious person and passionate about many things, and it’s a great trait. Minimalism is not about putting boundaries on what you can and can’t learn, it’s about efficiency. By this article I’ve wanted to simple highlight a good and practically simple way to gain more focus and don’t lose yourself under the heavy load of the information accumulated by mankind and thrown at us from every direction.

💣 Conclusion

So, we’ve just slightly touched the topic of current educational issues and how minimalism changes the picture. It’s highly important to be able to recognize those issues and to know what you really need to learn to achieve your goals and how to do it more efficiently in the long run. The accumulated information of a human race is out there and we can get it by various means at any given time, what we need is to have a basic functional structure to know where to look and how to apply it to our advantage. Build your life on your own terms!

“We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy.”

- Richard Foster

Don’t forget to tell us what you think of the minimalistic approach and whether it really can change things for the better?