The Problems with Education In 2022

The Problems with Education In 2022

By Paul Anthony Cook

This article was prompted by a post I spied on LinkedIn that showed a young lady giving a speech in the UK House of Commons about her educational journey. She stated that she had passed her exams and met all her objectives at school but the system had ultimately failed her. The reasons she gave had been based upon her having to revise the ‘quadratic formula’ for her exam that saw her memorise data that she had stuck to her bedroom wall. She argued and quite rightly that whilst the concept in Mathematics was remarkable and something she now knew, it didn’t help her in what she wanted to do once she was out in the real world? And in part she is right, higher maths is great if we can apply it but what are we learning it for? I for example have been training teachers for over ten years and I have a PGCE and Masters in Education. I would say that after ten years you start to think about not always committing the authors information to memory based on all the research you have carried out and marked from students. This is because we have so much information to process, storing information isn’t always the right thing to do and whilst some can recall such information at the drop of a hat due to my dyslexia I can’t. So whilst I retain key principles of what I do and my research and that of my students I choose not to store information but rather have a working knowledge of the theories I need to work with when dealing with my students. I also think that if we rely too heavily on stored information we can tend to polarise our responses based on that top tier of information that we are storing and that negates any further and different research routes. This can be experienced in any school or university in that preferred knowledge or authors are always used and dependant on the people delivering the lessons or lectures. I would rather have a research profile from a student that is more unique and exploratory than the same profile based upon the same usual suspects.

But going back to the former schoolgirl who was explaining the fact that she wasn’t prepared for life after school with her learning and the knowledge gained? If this is occurring in 2022 this was also happening in 1979 when I was just leaving school. However the difference between schooling in the seventy’s and now was the fact that we didn’t have a technology element. We had very prescribed routes to working and based upon how the school perceived you in lessons and activities which dictated what you were going to be in life. Usually it tended to be based around class, middle class kids become doctors, working class kids went off to the factories. But in 2022 we don’t have such polarised views of life and we have lost in the UK eighty percent of our manufacturing base that had fuelled work for working class people in the seventy’s. ?Some might argue that this is the result of economic policies of the government at the time but generally it was a different time and required different skill sets to be taught. What I would say is that in 2022 whilst we are trying to maintain the traditional skill sets even though we don’t have a manufacturing base as such we also have to deal with a technological revolution that has not ceased since the early ninety’s. But again this is somewhat of another rabbit hole that we tend to fall down as equally there are no new jobs that could fuel a tech driven teaching agenda only the now traditional skill sets that are required by those servicing the digital industries such as a BSC in Computing also available in 1979. There is not a job for a young a person that relies on them using their mobile phone and interacting with social media, unless you are an online influencer or a YouTube marketer and these are not skills taught in schools (In fact mobiles are banned). ?We have to differentiate between what technology is and does for us in our everyday lives and how that is applied to skill sets. And then how someone would work with those skills to gain a job in the associated industries in 2022? Having three million followers on social media is a customer base and it has been built by an entrepreneur. And again it is not taught in schools and it is not a career choice that is recognised. Again advertising was never taught in school in 1979 and that is what social media is, it is a vehicle for advertisers. Should we be teaching social media skills and advertising in schools in 2022?

But it gives you an idea of the choice for young people; ideally all male children at around age nine in 2022 would like to work for Fortnite. But that choice is based upon becoming a games level designer in an industry that is not the focus of a school and if it is it doesn’t have enough of a focus to advise that nine year old what skills he needs to acquire such a skill set? And I think that is the crux of the problem here in 2022 there are so many great things going on but children have little access to them through the normal educational routes that are inadequate. It also brings me onto my conclusion in my degree at the time in 2000 after working with children building a maths game to be played on via the internet at that time. And that was based upon the kids showing me what the game would be like based on their current gaming experiences at the time. This taught me that whilst as an adult I could go into their world and design them a game, their experience of their time was vastly different to mine. Their skills had been developed completely different to mine and subsequently their perception of everything around them was nothing compared to mine. My conclusion in 2018 in my Masters degree research kicked out the same data and that was that nothing was equal in 2018 within the online learning of information or its dissemination to people. Hence the reason we have in 2022 young school girls in the House of Commons in the UK suggesting that the education system is failing them. This might be a broad church but there is some truth to this, if you really start to analyse the data.

There will be a revolution in the education system but it won’t come from governments it will come from people not being satisfied with the governments of the world not meeting their expectations. Elon Musk himself one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this age has suggested that young people do not need to go to school or college and that there is everything they need to learn outside of those institutions. Possibly we are finally starting to see the dissatisfaction of those involved in this system and no doubt this will continue given how hard it is for governments to maintain education settings in 2022. The question is, what is the brave new world going to look like; will it rely on younger people finally getting somewhere close to their reality? Or will we continue to force old ways, old realties onto young people in the hope that we can offer them some traditional employment in the future? I guess the question for us all is what do we exactly need in our future? Greta Thunberg suggests we do not need anything at all material and she is one young nineteen year old thinker that is possibly giving us a glimpse into the world of young people tomorrow.