My problem with our education system

After picking my son up from school, I asked him about one of his friends. He told me that his friend had the flu and was home sick. Then he began asking me about the flu, what it is, how flu shots work, and so on.

I tried to explain viruses, inoculation, and antifragility in six-year-old language and stopped after some stumbling in what I was sure made no sense. After a moment of silence Tyler said, "Daddy, keep talking about that."

I think about this whenever I hear him complain about going to school or having to do homework. I think about whether or not he ever tells his teacher, "Keep talking about that." Like most children, he has a natural curiosity about certain subjects. I don't blame his teacher, he simply cannot explore these curious impulses because it's not part of the curriculum.

Here's what worries me: I'm 36 and I'm still not sure what the end goal of K-12 education is.

Is it to get a job? Then why don't we teach job skills?

Is it to be a good citizen? Then why don't we teach virtue?

Is it to get kids into college? This seems closest but it circles back to the original question: what is the point of college education? is it to teach virtue or job skills? And why wouldn't we teach those in K-12. Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory wasn't about 10,000 hours of classroom instruction, it was about 10,000 hours of empiricism.

Is it to teach resiliency? If so, then you could almost make the case that education is designed to make kids used to doing things they hate so they will be prepared for a job they abhor.

I think the current education system is designed to reward people who like learning for the sake of learning. It doesn't reward people who are inspired by learning for teleological means; someone who wants to build a rocket ship is motivated to learn the necessary science and mathematics even if they have no interest in learning about science and math for its own sake.

I understand that you need to know science if you want to discover cures to diseases. But my belief is that a kid who wants to learn how a flu shot works so he can get his friend healthy and playing cars with him again is not in a system that allows him to explore that. The systems tells him what he's allowed to learn about and when.

I know I'm not an educator and I'm probably oversimplifying things, but I believe that the goal of our education system should be to find what makes a kid say, "Keep talking about that" and to answer his questions instead of asking him yours. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.