Time to change how we educate

I have written about this before, I can’t remember where, but I was inspired to revisit the subject by Robert Halfon, chairman of the Education Select Committee.

He has commented that GCSEs are a waste of time when most people don’t stop education at 16 but go onto at least 18. They are too academically focused and really don’t work for anyone.

Here! Here!

In fact, I would argue that this was the case back in the seventies with the O-Levels. The newest raft of changes to GCSEs more resemble those archaic certificates with their heavy reliance on a final exam.

Well, I am intelligent, clever and resourceful, and I was terrible at exams. I still am. I did abysmally at some of my O-Levels even though I understood the subjects. I couldn’t remember the facts. So what was the point? No one ever asked to look at them and the certificates ended up in the bin.

But for two years, they made my life at school miserable.

You can’t touch it!

What Halfon is suggesting by bringing non-academic learning much more to the fore is quite a radical change, but I think we need to go further.

But there is a huge problem.

Politicians link the success of our country and it’s standing in the world to how our education system works. They argue that we need to to have the best university education, the highest academic achievements in all fields, and show we are just brainier than everyone else.

That sort of approach is fine for a business, to customise your offering to suit the financial demands of the company, but the UK is not a business, it is a land full of people. And the first responsibility of government is not international league tables, it is the well being of the people of the country, and to allow them to live the only life they have in a way they want or must by their own situation, not because the government thinks they must be a star in computer studies.

So, allowing for that mad problem, how far could we go?

Kids are not Children

It is no coincidence that the rise of the teenager has coincided with the change in our education system over the last 100 years.

Teens might be a boiling pot of annoying hormones, but they are also thinking people with ideas and ambitions. The problem with the current education system is that it often funnels those ambitions, that freedom of thinking, and you often can’t really realise it till you fall out of university and look for a job. Even then, you might end up stuck.

The problem is that higher education happens at the wrong time and we end up keeping kids as children far longer than they need to be. They get bored and act up! Too right!

Higher education of any sort is perfectly suited for when you have something you need to achieve and you need the knowledge to do it.

In the bad old days, people like my father left school at fourteen. He worked for a carpenter, then a bit of post office work, I think, and eventually ended up at a building society.

He had to put things on hold for WW2, but he returned and ended up as a building society manager. You could in those days. You entered with little education then got the chance to do the qualification as part of the job. I think his was the building society certificate or something.

These days, you would have to go to university before you even got the job. Why?

But more to the point, back in those days, young people were holding down a job, they were learning about money and responsibility, and getting their act together, and they were doing this seven years before young people do now. And they were good at it! Age wasn’t a problem and nor was the hormones.

Think of a mountain range

Finding your way in life is like climbing mountains. If you have ever been to a steep-sided valley in the alps and spun your self around, it is really hard to work out where the tallest or more interesting peaks are. They are either hidden by clouds or obscured by the foothills. They are all “somewhere over there,” or maybe “over there?” Or even behind you!

But if you climb up any one of the lower hills, you get a much better view. You can now see all the mountains clearly and decide which one you want to climb. If you are on the wrong one, well it’s only a quick hike back into the valley.

Living your life and working at a career is very much like that. How many times have you heard someone say, “I did the wrong degree!” or even, “I am going back to college!” Most likely, they just stick where they are and put up with their wrong choices.

I almost did that.

I wanted to do art, music, and English at school, but I was okay at sciences and maths, and the school were desperate to get onto those early academic league tables. So that is where I was pushed. I hated it and dropped out.

I have had an okay career in music and sound, nothing spectacular, but now I am older I am learning to draw and write. Bloody hell, I wish I had done that all back then! I can’t afford to rush off to college now.

You see, I climbed the offered mountain without being able to see the rest. I believed the fibs of my parents and teachers that there was no proper future being an artist.

But what would have happened if I had left school at fourteen and found out that there was a possibility of doing what I loved to do because I was now working and had a very different view of the mountains? What if I was allowed to play around in the foothills?

So, a complete overhaul

Here is my system that will never happen. We’ll break it into years.

5–11 Primary

Pretty much as now. I think our primary education system that works hard at making education fun is good. I would like it ALL to be secular and for all children to have to go to non-religious schools, and I would like for the University word never to be mentioned! Let’s keep things broad and open.

11–14 Secondary preparative

Now the big change.

This is all about education for life. We make sure people can read and write, do basic maths, understand something of the world, and get a good sense of who they are and what they can achieve. We are very definitely not trying to produce future university candidates here or anything else, but are making sure young people have a good foundation for anything.

Crucially, there are no exams.

14–18 Working

At 14 you leave school and you go to work!

What? Oh, yeah. This could be all kinds of things, including work in the voluntary sector. It may even be more than one job.

Schools would have a team of people whose job it is to get young people out there and doing. It could be working contractually for short periods of time, it might be a long-term job… really anything.

They would be at the bottom of the ladder with no exceptions. No private education workarounds here!

It would have to be policed so the young workers weren’t abused or used as throw-away labour, of course.

The main intent is to give a nice long period where you can find out about the world for yourself. Taste it to see what you like or don’t like.

18–21 Tertiary Education

When you are eighteen you will be faced with several choices.

You can go to college and study some set of subjects that might lead to university.

You might go to a vocational college where you can start an apprenticeship sandwiched with some more varied academic learning — a kind of mix and match.

You might be picked up by a company who sees your potential and will give you training on a job or even sponsor higher education — no loans in that case!

There are a lot of possibilities here. But having now worked for four years, you will know a lot more about yourself. you will know whether you are hungry for facts and figures, or hungry for a big career, or simply want a straight forward job so you can concentrate on hobbies and special interests.

You might have spent two years on a farm and realise that is where you belong, or not! You might have been a runner in a firm of accountants and now you want as much academia as you can get! You might be me and realise that there is money to be had as a graphic artist and you should learn to paint and draw properly.

You still might make the wrong choice, but the chances of making the right choice are now much higher!

So what about Uni?

Universities work best when they are centres of knowledge, not purveyors of tickets to get through doors.

So many of our degrees are really unsuited to university education. Take my own job. I am a sound engineer. I left school at sixteen, I have zero qualifications, and yet I trained a lot of sound engineers who worked under me — most had degrees.

They didn’t need them and I never referenced them. Sound Engineering is not that complicated. It is about using your ears and being creative. The button pushing bit is dead easy. The best place to learn to be a sound engineer is in a studio, and I think there are lots of graduates of sound courses who are a bit depressed that they get a job to find that they are making tea for the first six months.

And there are countless jobs like that. Back to my father, he was a branch manager of a building society (like a bank for those outside the UK) at a time when there wasn’t a call centre and computer doing the hard work for you. He had big books of charts to work out mortgages and complicated formula to help him assist deciding who qualified for a loan.

Now a computer program does all that. And yet you have to be a graduate to start? Why?

It’s a filtering process. The companies employ graduates so they don’t have to interview the rest and so they can reduce the amount of money they spend on training. They are cheating, in other words. All companies do this — it is how the system works.

Under my system, universities have two important roles only:

• They are places of research and the development of ideas.
• They are supplying academic education to those that require that particular kind of knowledge as part of their personal plan.

But they are not the default go-to place for young people. They are there simply if required.

Would this work?

Who knows? I am not an educationalist. But it would have worked really well for me and it would have worked for a couple of my younger family.

No system suits all, but I think this allows much more freedom and it allows young people to customise their future from a much younger age.

They are up to the challenge!

We dismiss 14-year-olds as children far too quickly and easily. They are young people, but they are not fools. We know they can handle work and responsibilities — they have been doing it for a couple of hundred thousand years until we decided that the modern variations are incapable of making a decision for themselves.

Personally, I would like to see the terms Man and Woman erased from the language. Let’s all be the same — boys and girls, or males and females , or maybe just people— so that we don’t so quickly become ageist about those who are younger or older.

Education should not be just at the front end of life, and indeed that may not even be the right time for most people. With a more flexible system, one that puts the onus on individual hopes, abilities and aspirations, rather than on an international reputation, there is a vague chance that people will do better, be more secure, and have a career that they don’t look back at with a strange sort of regret.

And what of that “world standing” that so obsesses the politicians?

Well, who the hell cares? I don’t.