ONE FOR THE ROAD

A lot has been said about the quality of education over the last few years—from the errors in school books, to the poor handling of online/hybrid classes, and now the revised schedules that force the kids to work through summer. But all of that pales in comparison to the inherently flawed structure that prepares our children to be followers rather than leaders, especially as we enter the digital era.
Think about it. What has changed over the last 100 years in education? Picture a car from 1923. Or a phone. Or anything. They have all evolved to the point where they are barely recognisable alongside their modern counterpart. Yet walk into your old classroom after 50 years or so of being away, and it will most likely look exactly the same. And its about time we started asking why.
Because the reality we need to accept here is: what got us here won’t necessarily get us there, which is basically another way of saying that the habits we pick up in school no longer create economic value. In fact, many would argue that it creates the opposite. And we need to figure out a new route before its too late.
Designed primarily to instill discipline and compliance rather than actual learning and critical thinking, the current system, which was designed by Horace Mann, served as a kind of boot camp to industrialize the world from an agricultural one.
Capitalists needed a compliant workforce that arrived at the same time every morning, left at the same time every day, ate at the same time in a canteen, raised their hands if they wanted to talk, wore uniforms to be identified, subscribed to one grading system that favored memorization over anything else, and above all, never, ever question the chain of command.
Now sad as that may be, that might have been useful during that transformation. The problem now, however, is that as we leave the industrial age for a digital one, software and AI can do all of the programmable stuff a lot better than any human, which has left this generation even more vulnerable to obsolescence and devoid of purpose. In other words, we are basically training them for a gun battle using knives. And nobody seems to be saying anything about that.
One gets the feeling that we only do it this way because its how we have always done it. Ironically, that is the same logic that Blockbuster video, Nokia, Kodak and all these other iconic brands that got swallowed up by their disruptors used when refusing to adapt. And while it’s fair to say that nobody really knows where the world will be going, all we do know is that we have entered an exponential era and a creator’s economy where people need to be more creative than ever in order to have an edge. So it is time we looked at developing new curriculum and learning environment that teaches them how to not only survive, but thrive.
Lets face it. The world looks nothing like it did 100 years ago. Heck, it looks nothing like it did before the pandemic. Yet here we are still using the same archaic system that demands our children to study for 12-16 years so they can be fully prepared to thrive in a world that nobody knows will look like in five years time.