This article originally appeared in Public Servant Daily

Education must look to the future
Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The education system was designed for a bygone age, says Richard Gerver. It needs to revise what it holds at its core and redefine basic skills to include creativity, innovation, problem solving and teamwork

As an educator, my responsibility is to prepare the children in my care for their future. It is not to deliver strategies designed for political aims in a soundbite kingdom It was American organisational change guru Price Pritchett who observed a fly furiously buzzing against a window pane in an effort to escape to the outside world. The tragedy of the fly’s plight was that it was working so hard trying to get through the glass that it did not look for a different route - and so it died there on the window sill. Yet yards away was an open door.

That is the real danger that faces education in this country. Our teachers are the most skilled and committed in the world. What they are being asked to do, however, is not the answer.

We all want our children to be successful and to fulfil their dreams. Selfishly, I also want our kids to succeed to ensure that I can live on a decent pension. Unfortunately, ours is a system designed for a bygone age and overseen in a cutthroat political climate. It needs to be so different. I believe that, as an educator, my primary responsibility is to prepare the children in my care for their future. It is not to serve to deliver strategies designed for political aims in a soundbite kingdom.

So what does the future hold? This is not an easy question to answer as the future is shifting so quickly. What we do know is that it will look nothing like today.

In terms of employment, it is believed that - unlike today’s retired citizens, who on average held down three to five jobs - our children will have worked in 18 different settings at least. We know that the service sector will boom along with technology and finance and that most of our children will live a life of short-term contracting around the globe.

This will mean our education system will need to revise what it holds at its core. Of course children will need to read, write and add up but we need to redefine basic skills. They must include creativity, innovation, problem solving and teamwork. The so-called soft skills have become hard currency yet they are often passed off as abstract nonsense.

We are facing a crisis where we are not only squandering nature’s resources but human resources too. Our curriculum, in order to be world class, needs to be designed around 21st century themes – not around a tweaked 19th century model.

Pandora's Box has been opened and we must accept the technological revolution, complete with its yin and yang. Our kids are far more complex consumers than we were. We must harness our children’s interests and find ways to use them to help children see the joy of learning.

This will not be done by selling the concept of schooling along the lines of “if you don’t join in, and attend, your mum will get carted off by the social”. Or by the idea that you ban their technologies at the gate and tell them that everything that they hold dear is nonsense. We should not increase punishment, but ask what we have to do to make learning irresistible.

Some have started to explore this, particularly online. By the end of 2006, MySpace had more than 106 million registered users. In the US, schools are already using Second Life to take students on virtual journeys exploring great works of art. In May of last year, Second Life held a virtual education conference that attracted over 140,000 delegates.

So what is to be done here? I am very optimistic: there are people in government who know what they are doing. Mick Waters, the director of curriculum at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, and his team are making progress. They recently reformed the Key Stage 3 curriculum and are now engaged in a major review of the primary curriculum.

Crucial though is that the government and opposition stop defining education policy based on the demands of the national press. It will involve risk and some failure but it does need to be radically different. Tests and league tables are not the answer, whatever schools minister Jim Knight may say.

Education can no longer be based on an industrial, production line model. It needs to nurture the individual and tool them up for the future. If we don’t grasp the nettle our pupils and our teachers may well end up dying on a sill below a window pane.