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It’s safe to say that Israel Adesanya didn’t have a typical childhood. Born in Nigeria, he moved to New Zealand at age 10, with what were apparently his parents’ hope of providing him with a better education. Eventually, while the ‘Last Stylebender’ ended up going to college for computer design, the lure of a combat sports career proved far stronger than a potential future of office work.
Perhaps that kind of history and mentality explains the 34-year-old UFC champion’s outlook on education. Notably, he doesn’t sound particularly sold on the idea that kids need to be going to public schools to learn their ABCs and 123s.
Israel Adesanya reveals his education plan
In an interview clip recently making the rounds, Israel Adesanya highlighted his thoughts on education. Most notably that he didn’t feel like he got a lot of use out of his and, when he has kids of his own, won’t be sending them into the public school system.
“F—k school,” Adesanya stated. “I don’t even know why we still have this whole f—king, just this outdated concept of school to just build workers. Because we know what the f—k school was made for. Why are we pretending? We know school was created to create workers.
“Bro, what the fuck is ‘X’? Bro, I’m still waiting, still. I’m like, when have I in my life as an adult known what the f—k ‘X’ is? No f—king idea. A lot of useless information passed on to me in school. And I sucked at school because I was s—t at memorizing. I didn’t really learn anything—dropouts, as we do…
“School doesn’t teach you much, honestly,” he continued. “It teaches you the basics. I understand math, yes, English, comprehension, all that kind of stuff. But when it come to social studies and algebra and calculus? I’m like, are you going to use those in the real world? So f—k school.
“My plan is, right, when I have kids, I’m going to have a tutor that’s going to teach them from the age—at home—from the time, say, maybe, 9am to mid-day or 1pm. And they’ll have an hour of homework, and the rest of the day we’ll just go on adventures doing s—t.”
Israel Adesanya doesn’t want his kids socially isolated
Of course, one of the major problems with having your kids exclusively educated at home is that they don’t get to spend a lot of time around other kids, learning to socialize. Adesanya has a plan for that, however. As far as he’s concerned, his kids can get their socialization through sports.
“But then, they’re going to do gymnastics, compulsory,” Adesanya explained. “Because I want to make sure they know their body; the foundation of athleticism, gymnastics. And Jiu Jitsu, so that they’re involved with other kids and not socially awkward. You don’t want to raise some f—king bum kids who don’t have any social skills. But, I want to make sure that they have those kinds of skills by interacting with other kids through gymnastics or Jiu Jitsu, or other activities. And they’ll do that every day or every whatever days of the week it is.
“But school? Going there, clocking in, sitting down? Watching the teacher write some s—t on the board and write, write, write? No one’s teaching. Literally, some of these people are just there to cash a paycheck. I’ve seen it. I was in school. You just see them there, they’ll write the s—t on the board.”
Israel Adesanya visited his childhood school in Nigeria
While he may not feel that the education system is all that functional or catered particularly well to his needs, that didn’t stop Adesanya from taking some time to go visit the place where his sporting and academic life began, the Chrisland School in Opebi, Nigeria. Adesanya spoke to children there back in 2019, taking some time to reminisce and show off his UFC title belt.
Adesanya is currently set to take on middleweight title contender Sean Strickland at UFC 293 this Saturday in Sydney, Australia. If current betting lines are to be believed, the City Kickboxing star is about to take his opponent to the school of hard knocks.
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