The education system has failed you

I was never a good student in school.

Wouldn't do my homework or pay attention in class.

Barely got passing grades in middle and high school.

They didn't know it back then but I had ADHD.

But that's a topic for another day.

Today we talk about language learning.

Languages were the first thing in school I was good at.

Well, kind of.

I grew up bilingual and I accidentally learned English faster and better than most.

Thanks to video games and the internet. 

I didn't know it back then but I was learning with the natural approach.

The problem was that classes and exams were grammar and theory based.

So even if I could read, write and speak better than most kids in both Basque and Spanish.

I had no interest in verbs, adjectives, cases, sentences structures and all that nonsense.

No interest means paying no attention in class.

Paying no attention in class means no idea what to do in the exam.

So I'd fail grammar exams in languages in which I was getting 9/10 and 10/10 grades in written essays.

That's how late in French the education system is when it comes to languages (and probably many other things).

It's not about you developing skills and being a competent reader, writer or speaker.

It's about giving the right answers in a test that has no practical application whatsoever.

"Yeah yeah you write well and all that but..can you tell me where adjective is in this sentence?"

So stupid...

English was a different animal because the overall level was so low.

I would easily get +95% right answers in tests while having no idea about which tenses I was using.

I naturally knew the right answers and they simply sounded right.

Not because I was a genius.

But because I was getting massive input at home and learning naturally.

Turns out reading and watching interesting content is more effective in order to improve your comprehension than studying boring grammar rules.

It's not a complicated concept to understand or try to implement.

But somehow the people in charge of the education system are too ignorant, lazy or stubborn to aknowledge it or do anything about it.

So 80% or more of the kids who went to English classes alongside with me can't speak English as adults.

That's after +10 years of English classes.

If that's not a massive failure of the education system I don't know what it is.

They should fix this as soon as possible.

And stop wasting taxpayer money and everyone's time.

And no.

It's not that complicated to fix:

Use interesting content instead of theory and grammar rules.

Focus on reading, writing and speaking better instead of multiple-choice tests and useless theory.

That's it.

In a couple decades you can go from having a big % of the population who are monolingual, semi illiterate in their own language and completely incompetent at public speaking.

To everyone speaking 3-4 languages and being a decent at both spoken and written communication.

Government apparatchiks and echyucators don't want to hear this though, they rather keep patting each other in the back about the great job they're doing with "echyucation".

Numbers don't lie.