The barista in Whole Foods probably has better academic qualifications than I do: it sounds as if he has degrees and diplomas up the wazoo. He's sussed I used to be a secondary teacher (though I've told him I'm all right now) and he knows where our schools are going wrong: apparently they are not preparing young people for the future.
For the life of me I don't know how schools would go about that. Think back to what the world was like 50 years ago, in 1963: no computers, no flatscreen tellies, no remotes, no mobiles, no internet. People who started work then are just coming to the end of their working life, having lived through several workplace revolutions.
The aim then was for teachers to equip young people with basic language and maths skills so they could join the workforce, where employers would give them the skills they needed for work. Teachers then couldn't have predicted how technology would change the working world - and they certainly can't now, when the pace of change in technology is so much faster.
What's changed mainly is that now a lot of employers don't invest so much in their workforce: they expect schools, colleges and universities to send them young people ready for work. Employers offer gey few apprenticeships, not that much training and as for refresher courses - if workers need refreshed, mostly they have to do it for themselves these days. The curriculum is overloaded: teachers in schools are trying to hit a whole range of targets in a whole range of subjects and have less and less time to do it. I swear I will strike the next person who says: the schools should be dealing with that - whether it be breast-feeding or mortgage education or media training or the safe use of car seats ffs. Learning is cut up into chunks and testing reigns supreme. Not a methodology that suits subjects where you need time to absorb the content and master each stage before you proceed to the next.
I remember meeting with academics at Glasgow University 25 years ago on the subject of German. They lamented that we (the schools) were sending them students who couldn't handle German grammar. We were supposed to train learners in grammar so the university could take over and do the clever stuff: literature. What on earth would these academics make of the situation now?
German is just about dead in Scottish schools, despite the fact that Germany is a major trading partner of Scotland's. In fact, almost all languages are dead or dying in Scottish schools. Russian's just about gone, as is Italian. French and Spanish are hanging on there, but against the wishes of some headteachers with their eye on their school exam results. No point telling them the results for languages are in fact better than for most subjects. They think learning languages is hard work - and they are right.
On that basis, any subject that is 'content-heavy' looks to me to be doomed in our schools: history, geography, languages, even computer programming. Even Maths and English, unless they are of the 'applied' kind are less and less popular at Further and Higher Ed levels.
Maybe it's time to agree what we want our schools to do and decide what it's possible for them to do in the time available. We could also work out what we think is important to our society. Personally, I think certain currently unfashionable school subjects would be right up there:
- history: if you don't know where you came from, you're ill-equipped to plan where you're going
- geography: if you don't understand the world, you can't protect it for future generations
- computer programming: if you don't know how the technology works, all you're doing is staring at a screen
- languages: it's not just about learning words - it's about communication, appreciating other people's cultures, understanding how language works.
Above all, I want us to think about the old evaluation of education: it's about educating the whole person, not just about training for work.
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