Rats vs Unicorns and the educational system

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about many different things.  Mostly “why” type of questions.  Perhaps I should elaborate.  Or not.  I don’t know.  I think the real problem is two-fold.  See, I don’t think I learned what I should have learned in school.  Reading, writing, and arithmetic are general subjects, but those aren’t the primary purpose of sending people though school.  As a creator of success, school is an absolute failure.  It’s been highly touted, though I’m not sure highly researched, that if you take 100 people out of any school the results will be vastly different.  Out of those 100, perhaps 10 will be moderately wealthy.  1 will be supremely wealthy.  And 90 will have zero or negative net worth. 

If that’s the case, then what are schools teaching?  Because if 90 out of 100 have a negative net worth, then that’s a fairly large failure rate.  What metric is being used to measure success?

I went through those systems.  I spent a lot of time learning the wrong thing.  And I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to learn and relearn the correct things.   The only problem with that is I don’t know what I need to be learning.  This shouldn’t be something that I have to redesign by hand.  It’s 2015.  Why haven’t we figured out how to train and teach for success yet?  Is the answer so complex that humans are incapable of understanding or developing the solution?  Or is it that our mental concept is so self-centric that we can’t think of long term solutions for education? 

I’m beginning to think the answer relates to rats and unicorns.  There’s a mental separation between those two animals.  They are more different than they are the same.  Unicorns are special, unique creatures.  They are these magical beings that are impossible to catch.

Rats are simple creatures.  There are more of them than humans.  There are rats everywhere.  There is roughly nothing unique about them.  A good 80% (assumption thrown in based on Pareto principle) of what makes a rat a rat is no different than any other rat.  It’s only via minor parts is the average rat ever special. 

So what do rats and unicorns have to do with education and technology in general? 

There aren’t any unicorns. 

There are a lot of rats.

Remember those two facts.  The next time someone discusses the uniqueness of what their selling, try to determine what is truly unique.  Mostly what you will find is a rat in a hat.  80% the same as every other alternative.  Really. 

There are no unicorns.  Just a bunch of rats with different color fur, or a hat, or something else that makes the rat not look like a rat.