Our current model of education is fundamentally flawed. It sits children in front of a whiteboard for eight hours a day and tells them things to copy into their notebooks. Not only are the methods of teaching flawed, but they are teaching the wrong things and targeting the wrong metrics for success. I'm not sure it would be possible to design a system better at taking children and replacing all of their curiosity about the world with obedience to authority.
What is the purpose of schooling?
We need adults educated enough to function as productive members of society. Though there is another purpose that the Covid lockdowns made all too visible: kids get in the way during the workweek, so we need to put them somewhere.
Neither of these is the right answer. Education should be about something more than job prospects and childcare. Children are learning machines, it's what they do. Children are tiny scientists. They ask why things are the way they are and they experiment to understand the world around them.
There is a saying that all scientists are just adults who managed to keep hold of their childlike wonder. If that's the distinction between scientists and everyone else, then most people have lost their curiosity by adulthood. Why? Because schools stamp it out of them. Students are not rewarded for questioning why, for creativity in problem-solving, or for making mistakes trying something new. They are rewarded for rote memorisation of facts without context. They are rewarded for passing exams that certify the completeness of their education. Ready made for the adult world, and all it cost was a sense of curiosity and joy of learning.
The joy of learning should be the reason for schooling. Children learn no matter what they do, and left to their own devices they will learn all kinds of interesting things. The purpose of school should be to harness and guide that curiosity, to help them learn more than they would on their own, and to make sure they pick up certain essential skills for adult life along the way.
So what should we actually learn while we're in school? The traditional subjects, mathematics, science, literature, history, are all important for a well-rounded education and I don't have much to argue with there. What I would add is that there are certain meta-skills that all students should have before they leave.
The art of research and self-teaching.
The world is being changed by technology so quickly that by the time you have learned a new skill, it is already shifting beneath you. Students need the ability to go and find out for themselves what they need to know, and then teach themselves how to do it. Without this, they will always be playing catch-up.
In the past, research skills meant knowing how to find information. You had to go to a library and find the right books or papers. That is no longer the challenge. We no longer live in an age of information scarcity but in one of information overload, and a great deal of what's out there is complete bullshit. Every student should leave school with a thorough understanding of the dangers of false information and, more importantly, the ability to distinguish truth from fiction. Evaluating the merits of an argument, validating its claims, determining whether it stands up to scrutiny. This is one of the most important skills of the modern world.
An understanding of political and legal systems.
We in democratic nations place a high value on our right to determine our own leaders, so it matters that everyone involved in the process understands why their vote counts and how the machinery of government actually works. Similarly, we value our legal systems, due process and trial by jury, and if we consider these important enough to build a society around, they should be important enough to teach in schools. It is not unreasonable to expect that everyone who might be summoned for jury duty should have had an education that explained what that means and why it matters.
If a student can leave school with a working understanding of their country's political and legal institutions, the skills to learn for themselves, and the ability to evaluate the information they encounter, then they will be far better prepared for whatever challenges the future holds. That seems like a better return on thirteen years of education than a folder of memorised facts they'll forget by summer.