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Should you be all-rounders or specialists?

Education gives us a broad and varied curriculum until we’re a young adult and can choose how we want to specialise. Is this what we need?

But should you?

First, let’s consider what education looks like at different stages:

  • Early Years: a focus on social, emotional and physical skills as well as helping them understand the world.
  • Primary and secondary: a range of subjects centred on STEM subjects (mainly science and maths) and the language of instruction with modern foreign languages, sport, humanities and creative subjects in the mix.

Everything we learn until we are around 18 years old trains us to be an all-rounder. You’ll have been encouraged to do sport, to get good grades in all your subjects and universities will want to see you achieving in all, or at least most, of your studies. Even when we go to university we may not specialise; if you’re reading this in America or Asia you are highly likely to have taken a range of subjects at university, as opposed to universities like those in the UK which generally specialise in a certain area. If we think of education as being measured by two metrics: breadth and depth, we very much focus on breadth and change, as we get older, to sacrifice breadth for depth in a given field. Although, if we stay the course until further education, we may end up specialising in the final years.

Education is very much about producing all-rounders.

Breadth Vs Depth in education

But aren’t degrees meant to prepare you for the career you want?

Well, a generation or two ago this is how undergraduate degrees worked: the lawyer would study law, the engineer would study engineering and the physicist would awkwardly study the feet of his fellow scientist as they shuffled about the faculty common room (I’m a physicist so I’m qualified to make this joke…) In the UK, Tony Blair’s focus on widening further education and making it the default pathways for students meant that the number of students taking degrees spiked during his stint as Prime Minister:

The number of students going on to further education in the UK spiked under Tony Blair

This was a common trend around the world. Cynically, this could be seen as a way of keeping unemployment numbers, a key measure of leadership success, low with more potential workers in study and more jobs in further education. Optimistically, this can be seen as another step in the democratisation of education, allowing more people to access provision for longer. Either way the result was:

  • More people have degrees so there is more competition in the job market
  • More people taking degrees and then changing their mind about their career
  • Degrees being much broader, with many many more course choices

This all meant that employers stopped asking for a specific degree and, instead, saw ‘any degree’ as a prerequisite for the their entry-level jobs. Instead of trusting the degree to train their employees in their field, they started to see degrees as a broad training and did the job specific training in house. Or they required another course on top of the undergraduate degree.

Alongside this pattern, tuition fee increases meant that universities have been under increasing pressure to do much more than simply teach subject content. As well as the usual things (quality of accommodation, cost of a pint, etc) students now want to know how universities will help them with their careers and mental health. What does this mean? That university education has become broader still, with less time devoted to specialised training unless you are going down a very specific pathway like medicine or veterinary science.

Education is there to produce all-rounders. Should it be? I’ve been thinking about whether this is the right course. I recently heard a podcast interviewing the comedian Jimmy Carr and it really made me think.

“If you get a D in Physics and you get an A in English, just go to English lessons. I’ll tell you what the world doesn’t need, someone who’s s**t at Physics” — Jimmy Carr

Find the thing you’re good at: https://www.tiktok.com/@thegoldencircle_/video/7264152411290291489

Too often, we automatically force ourselves to focus on our weaknesses and try and improve them. If your child is bad at maths you get them a maths tutor. Maybe this is wrong. Maybe, instead of attributing our limited resources to the things we’re bad at we should be focussing on the things we excel at.

Maybe we shouldn’t focus on our weaknesses

Of course, education is not a perfect system. For centuries education involved having a tutor and working individually or in very small groups. It was only when education was seen as a way of controlling the masses (one of the main drivers for mass education was to get everyone to read the bible at a time when education was control by the clergy) that we adopted big classrooms. Maybe the drive to educate all-rounders comes from the limitations of our system.

Maybe I’m going to stop working on my daughters spelling and get her more horse-riding lessons. What will you do?

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