A completely different education system

Following up on an article I wrote complaining there was too much reliance on university and academia, here is an alternative education system. I am sure I have done this before, but I cannot remember where!

The one part of our education system that works, more or less, is primary education; up to eleven. We teach basic skills, teach the process of how to learn, and teach about associating with other people.

We get a few things wrong. Religious schools by their very existence create separatism in a world where we need people to be together. In my mind, education should be secular and if parents want to add a religious bias, then they do that at the weekends or evenings. In school, those things that separate us are left aside, just as we do with race.

And I think that primary education should put more emphasis on languages; introducing a second language at an early age is much more sucessful and can make learning multiple languages later much easier.

It is secondary and tertiary education where it all goes wrong.

Growing up too slow

We often hear complaints about children growing up too fast. That is backwards. I think they are growing up too slowly!

From the early teenage years, a person is up for earning, not just learning. We have been like that in society for thousands of years. But now, we force kids to mature more slowly, call them “children” till they are twenty one, and stop them from flying.

The result? A pile of frustrated, angry young people, suffering from the huge pressures of education that we drown them in. They frequently are confused by the choices, take the wrong path, are scared for their future, and many are suffering from depression as a result.

All wrong.

And it is worse than that. When it comes to higher education, we ask them to aspire to something, to choose a direction, to set their future in academic stone. But we have isolated them, kept them in childhood, limited their exposure to the world. They may have read a lot or spent hours talking to people around the world on social media, but they haven’t been out there. Not in the day-to-day traffic of life in the same way as their ancestors.

It is like the old joke when asking directions: Well, I wouldn’t be starting from here.

So, I propose a radical shakeup.

School ends at 14

Secondary schools become a hell of a lot smaller. Just three years. That is three years when young people are taught the skills they need to communicate properly and get out there to do basic, but good jobs. No high levels of academia required! They are runners, apprentices, sales assistants, work in kitchens, on farms; basically, anything and everything that gets them out there earning. They get proper salaries, pay taxes, and do everything as if this is their job for life.

We set up special job centres that get young people jobs. One job for the entire period? Perhaps, but maybe two would be better? Or one per year for four years? There are a lot of different permutations possible here.

Anything could happen in this time. They might end up working for a company that just takes them from there and gives them everything else they need. Good, old-fashioned, in-house training with a long-term career path.

But for most people, at eighteen, after being out there for four years, they go back to education. That education could be anything; academia, arts, skills training, engineering, government, humanities, and in diversely resources educational establishments.

But they are doing this on the back of the job or jobs they have been doing for the last four years.

Think of being in a steep, cloudy valley. You want to climb a mountain, but which one? From your vantage point, you cannot see the peaks; they are obscured by the geography of the weather! So, you guess. You pick one and start climbing. Halfway up, you realise you are on the wrong mountain. This isn’t going to give you the view or satisfaction you crave. But you can’t just jump over to another mountain, the mountain way over there which looks much better. You have to climb back down and start again.

That is how education works currently.

But with this new system, you get the chance to play with the mountains a bit first. You can learn about them from people who have already climbed. You can get a sense of what climbing is like and what tools you work with best.

So when you head back into education, you have a much higher chance of choosing the route that suits you; not the government, but you. And you have the information you need to chose.

Learning till 25

But this is not a quick course. The next stage of your education will take you from eighteen till twenty five, if you wish. You will be learning many of the things you would have learned in the second half of the old secondary system, but tailored to your needs. That might mean you end up with a university style education in the latter years, or it might mean you have a more skills based education, or a right old mix. It will be modular and be available in the same establishments, so you can pick and mix based on what employers and you need.

But as I said earlier, some employers may want to offer this themselves. There is a big advantage in companies taking on the education role; something they used to do more of. You can teach subjects in the way that benefits the company and the employee, and you can build loyalty and a strong team.

Whichever route you take, you at eighteen is a different person to now. You have been working, responsible for your own finances, contributing to your family, to your own bills. You have built different kinds of relationships through the work environment. One way or another, you will be much more mature in your approach, even if you are still young at heart. The way you make the decision about your future will be radically different to how you would if you had been stuck in a local school all this time.

It is about choice

We boast about giving young people choice and opportunities, but then we force them down an academic-biased route that I would argue only really benefits a minority. Science needs that, teachers need the academic approach, and certain subjects like history or languages. But bank managers don’t need it. Plumbers don’t need it. Sound engineers in studios don’t need it. In fact, most jobs don’t!

This system, or a more refined version, will give a genuine choice by exposing young people to the world they have to live in and giving them first-hand experience and information that they can use to make the right decision for themselves.

Now, I am not an educationalist, and this is full of holes and idealism, but I think one thing does hold true; the current system is not giving young people what they need, it is only giving governments the statistics they want. And that is just wrong.