EDUCATION + INNOVATION
An Education System That’s Fit For Purpose
Some suggestions to make the secondary school curriculum less completely useless
Hands up who believes that their country has a great secondary school system, capable of equipping today’s teenagers for tomorrow’s reality? Anyone? Anyone? I’ll adopt the approach of Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher and take that as a ‘No’.
In fact, who believes that secondary education has improved in any way since Ferris and his friends decided enough was enough and dropped out, for a day at least? Or, for that matter, that it has appreciably changed in any way?
My kids are now the same age that I was when that movie came out in 1986, and from what I can see, it’s still the same old crap. I should point out that my gripe here is with the curriculum and how it is served up, like prison slop in separate sections of a metal canteen tray, rather than with the teachers who are forced by bureaucratic and political forces to do the serving.
Such stasis would be depressing enough even if the world had also remained the same. If the knowledge and skills needed to prosper, and the prospects of well-paid, stable employment for those that passed the suite of subjects deemed by the education ministries of the world to be of import were also unchanged.
Spoiler alert, Mr Minister: they ain’t. Even before AI, LLMs and all the rest of it again shook the foundations of our expectations as to the world of employment this year, the assumptions of the past, the assumptions in place when I was a teenager in the 1980s, being told to get good grades, go to university, and clock on for a lifetime of professional fulfilment, had already been undermined for decades.
The past ain’t what it used to be
The term ‘McJob’ was first recorded in 1986¹ — the very year that Ferris Bueller was released and I sat my first set of O-levels, as they were back then in the UK. Two years later, O-levels were rebranded GCSEs, by taking a marker pen to the text books and scribbling over the titles. The same system exists to this day.
Like I say, the same old crap.
Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity² came out at the dawn of the new millennium as the dot.com bubbles frothed right over the top of the venture capitalists’ champagne flutes and left a nasty stain on the carpet. In it, he argues that the certainties and stabilities of the past are gone for good. That constant shifts and changes now mark the lives of individuals and societies.
The “gig economy”³ was coined as a phrase in 2009, when any pretence that the western world could guarantee its citizens ever-increasing standards of living (whatever that might mean) was torpedoed below the water line by the GFC.
Well over a decade since the final nail was hammered into the school-job-carriage clock-pension paradigm by Messrs. Mae, Mac, Lehman and Lehman, our high schools continue to act as sausage machines, churning out identikit tubes of stale information that has already passed its sell-by date before it is out of the factory gates.
“Study hard!” we tell our kids. “Get a degree. Oh, and pick up fifty grand in debt while you’re at it”
“And by the way, did you read in the paper that by the time you’ve finished racking up that debt, 70% of the jobs that exist today will have disappeared or changed beyond recognition, and 70% of the jobs that will exist haven’t been invented yet! So good luck training for those!”
That is the reality. We’re screwed. Our kids are screwed. We all know it. Except for King Cnut⁴ on his leather throne at the Min. of Ed.
Obviously we have to try to teach them something. They all need to cover the basics of a range of subjects, if only as the foundations for future study for those who actually will choose or need to specialise in a particular academic discipline. But we know from our own experience, and can see from the changes happening in the world, that a collection of rudimentary knowledge, chopped up into discrete blocks like a collapsed Lego tower, is not going to cut it.
The citizens, workers and — I never thought I’d write this word without a sardonic sneer but oh-my-God look at me now — solopreneurs of the future need to be equipped with very different skills.
The skills of the future
They need interpersonal and presentational skills, the ability to delegate and cooperate, to react and correct on the fly, to perform instant post mortems and feed the lessons learned into the next iteration, or a completely different project.
And above all, they need the capacity to make connections. To link up everything they learn, see, hear, experience, feel. To make sense of it all, and to amalgamate it into a coherent whole, and if they can, to create a brand new cocktail from it that will inspire themselves and the world.
To learn those skills, they need to be presented with the world of knowledge as an interconnected web, where every single point is linked directly or indirectly to every other. And that, for me, remains the greatest failing of our schools and curriculums.
Everything is sectioned off into little boxes. Jumped-up theorists at governmental ministries rail against the ‘silos’ of administration that prevent cohesive policy-making. But then impose that exact same approach on those who will be the administrators and policy-makers of tomorrow!
One of the German words for ‘academic subject’, Fach, also literally means ‘a pigeonhole’. And that comes from a nation that does a far better than job than most in providing secondary education of relevance to vocational reality, although Germany will also face challenges as automation eats away at the more routine elements of the manufacturing sector.
A suggested curricular approach
So I would like to end by setting out an idea of the kind of approach that I think would have been more useful to myself, to my kids (too late for them, as any such change inevitably takes years to feed through the pipeline), and to the next generation of students.
Although where do we go after Generation Z? Does the designation mean that we have now reached the end of the line and can all just give up and pray for asteroids?
If not, if there is a future, then first of all let’s invest in it by building twice as many schools, so they are all half as big, and so have a greater sense of community. We will also need twice as many teachers, to halve class sizes to a maximum of around sixteen. That in itself will hugely improve morale, but we had better increase salaries by a good 30% or so, to make sure we attract and retain staff.
No, it’s not going to be cheap. But if we can’t afford that investment in our own children, the future of our own species and society, then yes, we really may as well give up and wait for the asteroids. Wake me up for the fireworks.
Once the resources have been put in place, giving teachers and schools the time and flexibility to implement this new approach, I envision something like the following interlinked project-based teaching, inspired by one of my daughter’s better experiences in her math class this year.
Yes, I appreciate that this will not work for every aspect of every subject. But as far as possible this should be the core of the learning experience, with extra elements of theory being handled through a flipped classroom⁵ methodology.
The Bake Sale
The students prepare choc-chip cookies to sell at a stall to other students, or at a school or community event.
They work out their budgets, the cost of their inputs, calculate required prices. They then make and sell the cookies and analyse the results. This leads on to plans to theoretically scale up the operation, thinking about the money they might need to borrow to buy the inputs, and how interest rates would affect their pricing model.
The projects in itself serves to cover various aspects of arithmetic, percentages, compound interest, averages, as well as several fundamentals of economics. That, at least is what it suggests to me, not being either a teacher (anymore) or mathematician (ever). I’m sure that an expert could squeeze a whole lot more mathematical juice out of the cookie stall. The probability of how many chips will be in each cookie, the ideal geometry of cookie boxes to maximise capacity…
Extending across the curriculum
But we don’t leave it there, shut off in math/economics class. We take the experience and drill down into different aspects, looking at what other curricular subjects have to tell us about them:
Geography
Where do the flour and chocolate come from? How are they produced and transported? What role do those products play in the economies of those countries? How are they affected by climate issues?
History
How did those trading relationships come about? Has our region of the world always sourced wheat and chocolate from those other regions/countries? How has that been shaped by historical processes such as colonisation, globalisation? How has chocolate’s role in different societies changed over the years?
Biology
How do the plants form the grain and pod that give us the wheat and chocolate? What is their function, as ide from giving us choc-chip cookies? How many other ways do plants have of reproducing? How do we digest choc-chip cookies? Why are some people intolerant to some of their ingredients?
Art, Design, Media
Produce a reportage of the whole experience, using sketches, photography, video. Interview the participants and create a presentation to show to the whole school community.
Chemistry
The science of baking, etc., etc.
And once they’ve finished with the cookies, in groups they are asked to come up with a follow-up project inspired by the experience, and draw up a list of all the questions they have about all the little details involved, think about which specialist teachers could help them explore that, and present their suggestions to the other groups.
You get the idea.
And I’m sure that plenty of teachers around the world have tried to put this kind of approach into practice — though it is far harder to do so at secondary level than at primary school, because of the coordination and resources issues (to be addressed partly through the budgetary boost I propose).
But above all because of curricular pressures to tick boxes in isolation. That mentality needs to be turned on its head, to make regular cross-curricular projects the core experience (with flexibility and autonomy for schools, teachers and students to devise their own and share them with other institutions), with the ‘academic disciplines’ as the satellites in orbit around the projects.
Pie in the sky? Maybe.
Worth trying out as a pilot? I would have thought so.
I really don’t think it could turn out any worse in preparing our kids for the world they will face tomorrow, than what is in place right now.
Footnote references:
1. McJobs.
3. Gig economy
4. King Cnut
Further reflections from a parent of teenagers:
