Disillusioned teacher looks to business to solve the problem with education

It is said that those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach? Well, they teach teachers. Admit it, comrades—you hate professional development sessions. You think the trainers are a bunch of bozos. I became one of them bozos after leaving the teaching service and joining the polytechnic.

I did my sums, and from a purely mathematical perspective, I was going to make an outsized impact working with teachers compared to being one in the classroom. Every year, I taught about 120 students, with 30 or so as their form teacher. In contrast, through professional development, I could reach anywhere from 20 to 80 teachers per session. Multiplying that by 120 students per teacher, the potential influence was staggering.

But schools, I finally learnt after 23 years in education, aren’t designed for change. They’re designed to endure. I should have known better and earlier especially after encouraging my colleagues to embrace creativity by “asking for forgiveness, not permission” - wise words that landed me in the principal’s office on treason charges. Then I had the temerity to tell an engineering school deputy director to place lab sessions before lectures. The former incident questions if indeed 80 x 120 = 9600, the latter confirmed it didn’t. Making change stick is so difficult, expecting it to happen after a three-hour interaction is delusional.

This isn’t unique to schools. Government agencies (which schools have effectively become) and churches share the same DNA. These are some of the most enduring institutions, deeply woven into the social fabric. Their longevity stems from embodying cultural significance and traditions that are inextricable from their communities. These organisations sustain the way of life for many because they contain valuable ideas that have withstood the test of centuries. However, they also harbour bad ideas that persist in the shadows.

Take schools, for example: few parents seriously consider not sending their children to school, even though nearly everyone criticises the system for being useless. Similarly, the Church of England: I recently heard a quip on a podcast that most Brits want it to continue existing, even though they have no intention of ever attending a worship service.

But here’s the problem: enduring is necessary so that a practice can take root but it is insufficient because organisations that fail to respond to their evolving environments inevitably decline. The most resilient institutions do not resist change, rather they integrate it by necessity.

This is where businesses come in. Well-run businesses last a long time thus allowing for meaningful change to be embedded through the products they put out into the market that solve real-world problems. However, the problems will evolve and eventually the solutions stop working. Businesses that fail to adapt then perish, while those that do continue to thrive. If education were built around the intellectual property of successful businesses, the best ideas would continuously circulate, and the bad ones would die as they should.

This disillusioned teacher looks to business to solve the problem with education. But no, your YouTube channel is not education!