If you look at the mind map you will see that the purpose of education to a certain degree is to produce well rounded, obedient, workers for industry and economic growth. We can safely say that on this level we are failing. The economy is in a terrible state and we are being overtaken by the rest of the world in industry.
Schools teach a curriculum and students are expected to arrive at a set of answers the culmination of which is standardised testing and grouping.
The top level may go on to university, the next level down may work in skilled jobs and the next level down may work in relatively unskilled work. There is another level, those of whom have been completely failed who drop out and lose hope. The news has been full of reports on such adolescents recently. These numbers appear to be on the increase. A report on the BBC news site yesterday stated that up to 80,000 children in the U.K are now classed as homeless.
These are the students who have been disempowered by this model of education. They are the ones who don't respond as well to testing or methods of teaching. So what can be done for them? Education today has produced a generation of dehumanised, impoverished young people. Faced with their lot some turn to drugs and crime but this is not to say that they all do and that they should all be labelled as such.
We have to look at this century in the same way as the industrialists looked at the beginning of the last century. We need an educational revolution. We have the people ready to deliver and already delivering in other countries, the same countries that are overtaking us in health, education, industry and technology. Just map the movements of Richard Gerver or Sir Ken Robinson or Dr. Steve Hughes over the last 12 months. Brazil, China, Scandinavia amongst others visited. What does this tell us? It tells us that these countries are receptive to change and that they acknowledge the people making that change happen inviting them to the forefront of their efforts to change.
The education system in the U.K. has done its job well. We are indeed passive and obedient and patriotic people. It is difficult to see where a revolution will come from. I was lucky enough to travel to Romania after the fall of Ceaucescu. My mission was to take Montessori education to the children in the orphanages. That revolution came about because one man stood up to the regime. His assassination prompted mass rioting ending in a revolution in Bucharest. My welcome couldn't have been warmer. My skills and ideas were embraced by people hungry for change. I am proud to say that they are still in place in many of the colleges and schools of Romania.
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