7 Ways to Reform the Broken Educational System

The educational system is broken.

There’s a vacuum that needs to be filled.

It will either be filled with a quality paradigm shift, or filled with people opting out, dropping out, and more of the same. 

I’ve thought a lot about education over the last decade.

I’ve been a teacher and lecturer for years now.

I’ve helped hundreds of students get top grades and get into the university of their dreams.

I’ve taught all over the world.

I spent my early twenties teaching in Tokyo, but I’ve taught people of every educational background.

I know the difference between an Indian education and an English education and a Chinese education and a German education.

I saw first hand the good and bad of the Oxford University tutorial system.

I’m accredited as a teacher, with distinctions, and I’ve put everything I’ve learnt on my own into practice when it comes to creating my own syllabuses and educational products.

I also know what it’s like to attend one of the worst schools in England, which felt more like a prison with daily fights and stabbings than a school.

So I’ve got a few thoughts on how to reform the broken educational system.

1 – Teach children basic finance.

Maths and Literacy are the two fundamental touchstones of education. But once you’ve got a handle on the basics, you’d be better set up for life if you’re taught basic financial advice.

Some will say that’s the duty of the parents, but that’s an idealistic position. Many parents will never teach their children these skills, and few are actually qualified to do so anyway.

If we’re teaching Pythagorus and pi, we need to be teaching practical mathematical skills.

Sure, some students will go on to be engineers or study finance at university, but a great number will be self-employed, entrepreneurial, or freelance.

The job market is increasingly skewed towards the self-employed.

Children should learn how to balance a check book, all about taxes, how to calculate and record incomings and outgoings, and all that spreadsheet goodness from the age of ten. It would take hardly any time and would set them in good stead for the years ahead.

The current educational system, by excluding such teachings, is just setting children up for a world that no longer exists. A world where mindless lemmings can find a job for life after school and not have to worry about most of this stuff = doesn’t exist anymore.

2 – Teach children how to cook and other basic survival skills.

This year revealed how ridiculously underprepared most people are when it comes to self-reliance.

Most people got fat and unhealthy during lockdown because they just ordered takeout most nights.

At my school (all boys), kids said we didn’t need to learn cooking because “that’s gay”. So we had woodwork class instead where kids made shivs and bashed each over the head with lumber.

Sure, teach kids carpentry skills. But why teach one aspect of self-sufficiency without another? 

Every child should have a repertoire of basic healthy delicious recipes and know how to whip up a meal without much thought.

Failing to make cooking/food science a compulsory subject in school is setting children up for a future of obesity and health problems.

Great news for Big Pharma, but not so great for the common men and women whose quality of life will drastically suffer.

3 – Have a 6-month apprenticeship during school time minimum.

Forget coursework.

Around the ages of 12-15, children should start testing out career paths and exploring potential vocations.

The best way to do this, and a baptism-of-fire style of learning that works incredibly well, is to have apprenticeships.

Children should be shadowing professionals in whose footsteps they might want to follow. They should be learning a craft from an early age, and immediately understanding what the world of work is like. 

Too many have their childhood extended well into their twenties because of university and have no idea what the real world is like.

We’re crippling our children by keeping them coddled in “safe-spaces”.

Apprenticeships are fun too. See how a real carpenter works. See what the electrician’s job is like on a daily basis. What do journalists at a real paper do? What do the day-to-day duties of a chef look like? 

4 – Teach children philosophy, ethics, and the love of learning from a young age.

Rather than plunge right into the subject material, children should be instilled with the love of learning from kindergarten age.

We can argue about how the best way to do that is, but surely we’re all agreed on the fact that a child who wants to learn is more optimal than a child who is forced to learn.

5 – We need better role-models as teachers.

Parents email me all the time asking how best to get their children into a top university.

I always say the child should see them reading.

Too many parents think it’s enough to tell their child to read.

But we all know that children use role-models to learn.

If they see an aspirational figure with a book in their hand, they will want to follow suit.

How can you tell you child to read but immediately go back to being glued to a screen yourself?

6 – We need to pay teachers better.

Is it any surprise that we have a brainwashing problem in our institutions?

What kind of quality of person do you really think is showing up to a job that barely pays them enough to live on? Of course they’re going to be bitter. Of course you’re not going to attract the best talent.

Government talks about putting money into education, but honestly where does that money go? Because it doesn’t go into the pockets of those responsible for our children’s minds and development of character.

Throwing a wild number out here: teachers should be given 3x their base salary (same for nurses) + KPI-based bonuses.

Don’t you think you’d get a better quality of person turning up for that salary?

Don’t you think they’ll be happy because they have their basic living needs more than accommodated for?

And won’t that translate to our children being better taken care of?

7 – There needs to be a robust approach to screen-teaching and real-life teaching.

I’m not anti-screen.

The future of education is online.

But I am totally anti paying full tuition to simply sit behind a computer. It’s not the same.

And it’s even worse for children that come from low-income housing brackets.

Do people not realise that working class parents have enough on their hands? Most of those households will only have one computer. Won’t that be a problem if the house has three children?

Screen-time teaching is part of the future, but we need a split between that, real class time, and vocation-directed apprenticeship learning.

And we need to take advantage of what the screen and online learning can offer.

Simply turning Zoom on and teaching as normal isn’t going to cut it.

We have the latest technology at our fingertips. Why aren’t we using it when it comes to education?

Those are just a few of my main thoughts when it comes to education.

What do you think?

How would you improve the educational system?