The idea that education prepares you for life is perverse. In a sane society, what you learn at school is…

The idea that education prepares you for life is perverse. In a sane society, what you learn at school is what should *change* the world. New knowledge, to fix problems. We’ve flipped this, and it changed everything. /1 https://t.co/nrthJOo7kP

Education became preparation for life when schools became job training. Universities are that now too. We have this bizarre idea that leaving education puts us into the ‘real world’. But what if the real world needed to be a lot more like education? /2

What if the problem with the world is that what we learn *isn’t* being used? That a status quo has hijacked education, to make it about people being ‘job-ready’? Rather than freshly educated people being the way we smash that status quo and its problems? /3

To understand is the most fundamental way humans are distinguished from all other living things. Our whole lives should centre on it. We should see students as our saviours, the people coming through to blow wide open everything we can’t understand or fix. /4

When I say we flipped this, and it changed everything? By using a model of education as preparation for life, we paradoxically did the opposite. We created isolated locations where children lived a culture of their own. Decoupled from adult life. /5

And when they then leave school, what do they do? They remake adult life, as school life. Like I say, we turned all of reality into a high school. Not by analogy. It is literally that. /6 https://t.co/1stDMhnULh

Perversely, by excluding kids from adult life, and saying we were preparing them for it (we weren’t, we just wanted them out of the way), we broke adult life. They developed their own culture, and replaced ours, with it. What if we had done the opposite? /7

If we’d conceived education as the way adult life would be enriched by new knowledge, we would never have separated education from that adult life in the first place. It was separating it out, as childcare for workers, that has now transformed all culture to school culture. /8

And not a culture of learning. The culture of the imitative rivalry of adolescent life. The one we all lived in school. The one that dominated all attempts at learning. Sure many of us still learned. /9

And that used to be useful, when you left school. At school it might just get you mocked or bullied as a geek or nerd. But our adult life needed the knowledge, so it used to be an escape from that school culture. /10

But we let that separation of education from life go on for long enough, that that adult life then became a school as well. What else would kids do when entering adult life, except re-form it using the only social model they knew? /11

Right now, every day, try getting knowledge about anything - renewable energy, Covid, climate change - through the treacle of the team sports of adult life. You’ll be as listened to as ‘geeks’ at school. Because you are still in school. That’s our culture. /end