School doesn’t prepare children for the world. It sorts them for It.

“Care should be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.”
— Michel de Montaigne, Of the Education of Children

Imagine that we were designing an education system from scratch.

We know that today’s children will enter a world shaped by artificial intelligence, climate change, migration, geopolitical instability and rapidly changing employment. They will have instant access to more information than any previous generation, as well of course to more misinformation.

Would we prepare them by dividing knowledge into isolated subjects, ringing a bell every 50 minutes and testing how much information they can reproduce under examination conditions? Almost certainly not.

Yet this is essentially the system we continue to operate: a modernist curriculum built upon separation, standardisation and specialisation, preparing young people for a postmodern world in which everything is connected.

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