Education Innovator Graham Brown-Martin was recently featured in an article for the Guardian by George Monbiot, explaining the redundant teaching methods currently used in schooling, and the education system’s reluctance to change.
Using Brown-Martin’s research, Monbiot argues that “our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.”
Manbiot goes on to say that children are not only being taught skills that are redundant, but also counter-productive. Meaning that the “dehumanising” schooling that children endure is in fact pointless.
“Any attempt to change the system, to equip children for the likely demands of the 21st century, rather than those of the 19th, is demonised by governments and newspapers as “social engineering”. Well, of course it is. All teaching is social engineering. At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era. Under Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and a nostalgic government in Britain, it’s likely only to become worse.”
More on Graham Brown-Martin
Graham Brown-Martin is the author of Learning {Re}imagined which explains why character, creativity and inspiration are stifled by an educational regime of micromanagement.
As a serial disruptor, Graham draws on his experiences of creating startups and organisations that challenged the status quo across the digital, creative and education sectors.
Graham founded Learning Without Frontiers (LWF), a global movement that brought together renowned educators, technologists and creatives to share provocative and challenging ideas about the future of learning. He left LWF in 2013 to pursue new programmes and ideas designed to transform the way we learn, communicate and live.
To read the article in full, click here.
To read Graham Brown-Martin’s speaker profile, click here.
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