What I Think Education Is Missing
What reading about sleep, maturity, and emotions made me think schools should do differently.
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For me education means building a better model of the world. That helps us predict, adapt, and thrive. We've been gathering knowledge for millennia and if we're serious about what we pass down, we should look at what we already know and ask what we can do better.
When I started reading The School of Life I felt this is something I actually miss and want to learn properly. Attachment styles, emotional intelligence, how we lead our social lives — a big chunk of life apart from the usual technical education we get. We're expected to figure this out on our own. The more I read, the more I realize that we're failing at this in ways which are obvious and entirely fixable. Research exists but I've no clue why in the hell authorities and people responsible don't take it seriously.
Confusing Maturity For Ability
Gladwell documents in Outliers how physical maturity affects the trajectory of a child. In Canadian hockey, the eligibility cutoff is January 1 and if you look at stats, in elite groups, 40% of players are born January through March and 10% are born October through December. A twelve-month age gap at age five or six is enormous — the older kids aren't necessarily more talented, they're physically more mature. They get picked for better teams, get better coaching.
It's not only about sports, it shows up in education too. The small initial advantage persists which locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement that stretch on for years. Teachers confuse maturity with ability. Researcher Elizabeth Dhuey calls it outlandish that arbitrary cutoff dates cause these long-lasting effects and nobody seems to care.
In Denmark, no ability grouping is done until the age of ten and it's shown to work. They wait for maturity differences to even out before making any selection decisions. Recent research supports the logic: a 2023 study found the relative age effect holds strong until at least sixteen, which is an argument for tracking students as late as possible, not as early as we do.[1]
Here's what concerns me beyond the academic side. From what I've learned about psychology and attachment — when a child is young and falling behind, they don't have the tools to understand why. They develop coping mechanisms. They internalize beliefs: I'm not enough, everyone else is just better. Those beliefs stretch through their entire life. We're passing on cumulative disadvantage knowingly, out of nothing more than an arbitrary calendar choice.
I believe everyone should be given a fair chance. If we know this effect exists, every state should at least audit whether birth date effects show up in their student populations. The methodology exists. Denmark has shown what works. Figure out when maturity levels even out and don't have kids go through major selection processes before that point. It might not be easy — cultural traditions, economic logistics, existing calendars all push back. But we have to ask ourselves: is short-term convenience worth writing off children before they've had a fair chance? Definitely a big NO!
Importance of Sleep
Walker's Why We Sleep has changed how I think about sleep entirely. Sleep is crucial for learning and brain development.
During adolescence the brain undergoes critical remodeling. Early childhood builds neural connections through REM sleep. Adolescence prunes them through deep NREM sleep, scaling back for efficiency. This pruning directly precedes improvements in cognitive skills, reasoning, and critical thinking.
Adolescents experience a biological shift in circadian rhythm. They naturally fall asleep later and need to wake later. But we force them to wake at 6 or 7 AM for early schooling.
Memories formed without sleep are weaker and evaporate rapidly. Our ability to regulate emotions also depends on sufficient REM sleep night after night. It's the thing keeping you alive just like air, but we all take it for granted. Personally I still struggle to maintain a regular sleep schedule and see the same patterns with friends. What chance does a teenager have when the system is working against their biology?
Districts that have pushed school start times later in the US saw improvements in attendance, grades, and mental health. We know this works (and better, I feel, is to carry out studies locally to know the actual impact it has on the lives of kids instead of extrapolating — how much budget is even allocated to this kind of study??). I can't fathom what policy makers are doing at this point; it's being ignored like it's nothing.
Are We Doing Exams Right?
Walker[2] changed his own practice after realizing that end-loading exams forces students into sleep deprivation which directly opposes the goal of teaching. He split courses into thirds, made exams non-cumulative, and applied spaced learning. The faculty response was icy. They blamed the students for not doing better.
Then there is the problem of understanding:
A Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek—even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, "What were Socrates' ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?"—and the student can't answer. Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?" the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrrr-up"—he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.
But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!
From Greece to Brazil (where Feynman addressed this to students and officials) to now, I don't think much has changed[3]. Exams don't test for true understanding; the way we do it currently seems to mask reality, giving us the illusion that we understand something but actually don't. It's getting worse with AI in the loop — we're outsourcing more than we realise.
Policies should be informed by how memory and learning actually work. And we need better ways to evaluate our understanding of a given subject. Spaced retrieval, sleep between study sessions, non-cumulative assessment — much has been studied but is never implemented.
Swimming In Unknown Waters
Our current systems focus much on technical and career aspects but very little on regulating emotions, psychology, understanding others, and how to lead life.
We're left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds, "a move as striking as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves."
— Alain De Botton
We're moving toward nuclear families and digital isolation. Where I come from, we used to have joint families where emotional knowledge was transmitted intergenerationally in an imperfect and subtle manner, but it was transmitted. That structure is disappearing. In some cultures it's still taboo to talk about emotions, particularly for men, who are often never taught a thing about how to express and regulate emotions.
Goleman wrote in 1995 that each generation of children was more troubled emotionally than the last — more lonely, depressed, angry, impulsive. The trend has only accelerated; diagnosed mental health conditions among US adolescents rose 35 percent between 2016 and 2023.[4] We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts.
Emotional literacy — including self-awareness, empathy, conflict resolution, and understanding attachment patterns — should be part of school curricula from early on. Not as an elective but something we take seriously.
Dawn of Generalists
I'm a big fan of interdisciplinary thinking and believe in having a systems-level picture first and then categorizing aspects within to have a comprehensive understanding. Post World War II, we are in an era of big science; until then a biologist or physicist was able to know the bulk of their field, but since then the amount of new knowledge being created has grown exponentially and we have seen deepening of specialities into fields and subfields. It's more difficult than ever to have a good understanding of a single field. For innovation, instead of creating experts we should be striving to create a populace that is able to comprehend multiple fields while still excelling in some area. We need generalists who can solve problems by switching fields, reading papers, or consulting experts in other fields effectively (being able to communicate the problem is quite necessary).
We don't teach children to see how parts relate to wholes — to think in systems.
Hamming argued that the ability to see the larger context of your work is what separates people who contribute from people who perform tasks.[5] And we silo knowledge into departments when the most interesting work has always been interdisciplinary. Bell Labs did this well; their structure rewarded collaboration across disciplines by design.[6]
In primary to secondary schooling, I don't see stories being told of innovation and big projects that changed the world, and research at grad and upper levels seems to be more about publishing than doing real science. There is a big debate about incentive structure in academia which I don't want to get into, but in schools we can tell the tales of what changed the world to bring us where we are today[7] — which would give kids perspective on how big problems were solved, how it's done now, and how the process has evolved.
Illusion of Narratives
The gap I feel most personally lacking is critical thinking, more specifically, empirical skepticism. I'd been watching Huberman and other podcasts for a while, and earlier whenever I'd see a fact on Telegram or Pinterest I'd just believe it. Oh wow, what a cool thing. Then I started consuming critics of these podcasts and they talk about the narratives and motives behind them. What hit me hardest was something I learned from Taleb's Black Swan: how easy it is to fool ourselves with narratives. We get swayed. It's very much possible that when a guest(expert in their field) arrives on (even a very credible) podcast they can make mistakes they don't know they're making. Do they read the methodology of the paper they're citing? Are they nitpicking data points? Do they know if the results are generalizable — if the study was done on animals, or on a specific culture? We need transparency so the listener knows how things are being extrapolated, but is never garenteed. We live in a world where information overload is getting a bigger and bigger problem. It's crucial to be able to tell sense from nonsense and find the truth.
It comes with a lot of practice, and schools could introduce ways of helping kids do this. Very little has been implemented, and this is something every subject teacher has to know. Just because you're teaching a non-technical subject doesn't mean you get to pass on this; the tradition of inquiry should be at the core and encouraged.
The thing that frustrates me is that none of this is new. The research has been sitting in books for years, sometimes decades. The question we need to ask is: what's stopping us? Cultural tradition? Economic inertia? The fact that institutions change one generation at a time? Institutes and governments should be transparent about the tradeoffs they are making for the next generation.
I think the uncomfortable answer is simpler. Our systems are built for adults, not children. School starts early because parents need to get to work. Exams are end-loaded because it's easier to administer. Cutoff dates are arbitrary because changing them is logistically inconvenient. Emotional education doesn't exist because nobody knows how to grade it. Every time there's a conflict between what's better for a child's development and what's more convenient for the adults running the system, convenience wins.
Maybe that's always been true. But the children growing up right now under arbitrary cutoff dates, sleep-deprived schedules, exam systems that punish their biology, and zero education about their own emotions — it isn't fair and is disheartening. It might not be easy to change things, but the fact that this research hasn't been converted to policy says a lot about who our systems are actually designed to serve.
Oterhals, G., Bachmann, K. E., Bjerke, A. H., & Pedersen, A. V. (2023). The relative age effect shifts students' choice of educational track even within a school system promoting equal opportunities. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1066264 ↩︎
I'm citing Matthew Walker, because I've read his book and ideas are derived from there. I urge you to also read his critics. My aim is to increase awareness of the importance of sleep for education and nudge policy makers to take it seriously. I've always found controversies with research popularizers; all we can do is be critical but don't be ignorant. ↩︎
From personal experience of Indian and German (masters) educational standards. I feel the definition of understanding is subjective and my experience might not resonate with yours, but I believe there is room for improvement here. ↩︎
Sappenfield O, Alberto C, Minnaert J, et al. Adolescent Mental and Behavioral Health, 2023. National Survey of Children's Health Data Briefs. Health Resources and Services Administration, October 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK608531/ ↩︎
See Hamming's Learning to Learn lectures on systems engineering and the importance of seeing the bigger picture while working on details. ↩︎
Bell Labs' organizational structure is documented in Kernighan's UNIX: A History and a Memoir. Broader collaborations were visible to more managers, creating a system that strongly favored interdisciplinary work. ↩︎
I would have been very glad if my childhood history was a long-stretched form of Sapiens instead of diving deep into particulars first. ↩︎