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  • Everyone agrees that education is hugely important

  • The thing is we're not particularly sure what we want from it

  • The aim of education should be to prepare us for the challenges of adult life

  • Yet from this perspective it's clear that schools fail all but a tiny portion of their students

  • Whether in highly academic private schools

  • Or in deprived government-run ones, trouble-dealing with life's challenges

  • remains very widespread indeed

  • Human ingenuity, energy, goodwill, and talent

  • is being lost on an industrial scale

  • to get more ambitious about education doesn't necessarily mean spending more money

  • building more schools, employing more teachers, or making exams more difficult

  • Rather, it should mean focusing more on the real purpose of education

  • There are two fundamental tasks it should help us with: working and sustaining good relationships

  • In order to address these needs a future national curriculum might specify

  • that the following subjects be studied

  • Firstly, capitalism

  • A conspiracy of silence exists around the economic system we live within

  • We find it hard to change its bad sides or defend its strengths

  • because we simply don't fully understand how it works

  • A subject like maths should be geared to teaching its number one utility for 99% of the population

  • dealing with money

  • Such classes would demystify the global economy

  • by teaching students the importance of the means of production and how profits are made

  • The role of cashflow, HR leadership, marketing, and competition would also be studied

  • In a perfect school system, you'd also then study a really big second subject

  • yourself

  • Young students would be introduced to the idea that we humans

  • are extremely prone to misunderstanding ourselves

  • They would be taken through the concepts of delusion, defensiveness

  • projection and denial in everyday life

  • Individual tutors would be on hand to help students toward personality maps

  • with particular attention paid to their neuroses and fears

  • Doing this would ensure that students learn a lot

  • about how complex they truly are

  • and what types of people they would be best suited to hang out with

  • A crucial unit would be devoted to career self-knowledge

  • What job are you best suited to?

  • Students would spend three hours a week

  • exploring what they might do with their futures

  • Then we would study relationships

  • Being intensely aware of the social and individual cost of every unhappy relationship

  • An ideal education system would emphasize

  • the acquisition of skills that help people

  • to live better together

  • There would be units on kindness and forgiveness

  • as well as on anxiety reduction techniques

  • In this educational utopia, it wouln't only be children who would go to school

  • but adults as well

  • Schooling would be for life

  • Education wouldn't just be taking place in classrooms

  • media and the arts would be made to maximize their teaching potential

  • and help to teach people what they actually need to learn

  • We're so hung up on the challenges of running a massive education system

  • we're failing to pinpoint the real source of its problems

  • These are primarily about money, salaries, or discipline

  • These are only a consequence of a more fundamental problem

  • Right now and with no one quite meaning for this to happen

  • we've simply got the wrong curriculum

Everyone agrees that education is hugely important

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