The average student does not exist.

I'm 21 years old now, and I have spent two thirds of my life being educated. My brother is 17, he's spent 11 years being educated. There was a reform between us, so he's been in public school one more year than I had when I was his age.

We have wildly different interests, but we still agree that most of what we did in school was a waste. The same goes for practically everyone I know. I think that for every Norwegian youngster you find that liked school (The educational part of it), you will find five, or ten who didn't.

I can see a lot of problems, but hardly any solutions. I wish to make it clear that I don't have any, and that I don't think there are any good ones, but I still think it's my right to point out problems, and hope that someone smarter than me can see solutions. Or alternatively, convince me that there are no problems; It doesn't seem very likely, but never let it be said that I was not open for it.

The main problem with Norwegian education the way I see it, is that it is tailored for the average student. This student does not exist. In nearly every class, you will find both bright and slow students, you will find people who average in one subject and aces another, you will find people who average in one, and dumps in another. I don't think you'll find anyone who averages every subject, and even if you did, that student would probably not be happy about his or her results, or the curriculum in every subject.

The bright students don't get the challenges they need to enjoy school, and the slow students don't get the help they need to enjoy school. This is a consequence of the fact that school is perfectly tailored to suit the person you get when you add these people together, and divide them by the number you have of them.

I think it is very important that we give everyone the chance to enjoy education, we give them the satisfaction of being good enough, but only after having worked for it. My little sister is 11, once in a while I give her a puzzle I consider to be hard for her, but not so hard that she gives up. She will work with it, and the joy she gets from solving it is more reward than I need to have for thinking it up. The amount of problems like that I encountered in school was pretty minimal.

When I started at university, I was pretty shocked to find out that basically everything I had learned up until that point was just disregarded. They started with things I had learned three years prior, and taught it all over again (In six months). I learned it a lot better the second time around, not only because I had done most of it before, but mostly because I was treated as a consenting adult rather than a child to be spoon fed. I was allowed to prioritize the things I found interesting, and that alone goes a long way towards making university cooler. Of course, there are still mandatory subjects if I want a degree, and not all of them are interesting at all.

My theory is that if basically all knowledge I had from earlier education (Except really basic things like spelling and fundamental arithmetic and so on) will be disregarded at university anyway, then the time in earlier education could be spent more wisely. A fine idea would be to help students discover what they are good at, and what they are interested in (These two things often overlap, as far as I can tell). I would have loved a school where I had the option to choose most of the time. I would certainly not have had to spend a year in university taking a degree that was not the right one for me, and then switch, like I did.

The fundamental curriculum in school is just outright boring and uninteresting when seen as a whole. Parts of it are cool, though. Is this the best we can do? Tailoring it into fitting a student that does not exist?