The Age of Value Creation

“What value can you bring to the table?”

The school system that brought us to where we are today cannot take us further. It has to change. It has outgrown its usefulness and relevance. It is no longer producing value that is relevant and useful in the 21st Century.

The above question is the usual question people get asked when they are interviewed. There was a time when the question asked had to do with what you know. That is the golden age of the school system: the age of knowledge. Today, if what you know cannot translate to value, you are not valuable.

The school system is more like an elephant. It is hard to teach an elephant how to dance. While studying the school system, what I have come to realize is that it has fallen into the knowledge trap. Teachers believe they know and cannot be taught. Instead of intentionally learning what industry wants, they ignore industry and even see them as an enemy.

No matter how we see it, the purpose of school is to prepare students to be humanly valuable and economically valuable wherever they are. Out in the world, grades are not important. What is important is what you can do: the value you can create. Some Universities are quickly learning from the business world that knowledge isn’t the new oil, value is. Universities like Harvard are recruiting people with experience and have unique value to offer.

I believe that school is at the last stage of becoming totally irrelevant. There are companies that recruit employees who never went to school but have the kind of skills they need.

The Agricultural Age: School was all about teaching people how to read and write.

The Industrial Age: School was all about teaching people to handle machines

The Information/Knowledge Age: School was all about teaching people to know new things.

The Value Creation Age: School should be all about expanding people’s mindsets and developing their capabilities. It's more about converting knowledge into value that people can use or moving resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of usefulness. In this age, schooling should be all about cultivating and harnessing human potential and ingenuity.

As companies begin to recruit and fill traditional roles with people who have developed the capabilities they need, the school system becomes more irrelevant. We can’t completely do away with the schools. They have their roles. We can create a new model of school but we can kill school altogether.

What we will be doing in the next 3-5 years is experimenting with different prototypes we have designed until we come up with the best model that serves the needs of the 21st century. And then create a system that allows schools to update and upgrade themselves as the world changes continually.

When the rate of change outside the school system is much more than within the school system, it means the end has come. That is why you need to support us to ensure that schools don’t go obsolete. You can help our school model design process by making your donation to:

Imagine a school where your children are taught not to write an examination and pass standardized tests but to use what they learn as the foundation to solve problems and create value. I can’t stop imagining that kind of school. The Value Creation Age is a time when everyone has been entrepreneurial.

Imagine a high school where students start working together as a team to solve problems all around them and translate them into value.

Imagine a school where those same students will learn how to build a business around the value they created.

Imagine students learning what work is by working and earning an income.

Imagine a school where students who want a career in teaching begin to understand what industry and people need and create value for universities and industries.

Imagine a school where rather than write exams, students are examined by how collaborative and creative they are.

Imagine a school where every student is taught geography, history, anthropology, and literature so they can become global citizens; have a global perspective of every decision they make.

Imagine a school that transforms students to be economically useful and humanly valuable.

Imagine a school that equips students to be leaders by involving them in doing what leaders do rather than putting them in a class and having them write exams about leadership and the students with the best grade are adjudged the leader.

Imagine a school that inspires students with a purpose and cause bigger than life that makes them to live intentionally. Their lives and careers are driven by their purpose.

Empathy is the key to building this new school model. Over the past two decades, we have observed the school system and its stakeholders and have interviewed them to know what they want. Now we are bringing all of this together to create a new school model so that the old model can rest in peace and be placed in the museum like the dinosaur.

It has fought the good fight. It has run its course. It has finished its race. It has served its generation. Now a place has been reserved for it in the museum. Help us send it to the museum as a monument child unburn can talk about. Donate!