Who is our current education system for? Who succeeds at it? If we were honest in answering these questions we'd have to admit that the purpose of the current education system is to produce university professors. Is this the pinnacle of all human achievement? Surely it's just a form of life. Ken Robinson tell us that the current education system came into being to meet the needs of industrialism and that the hierarchy of subjects is based on two ideas;
1. The most useful subjects for work are at the top. People are steered away from things at school; things that they like because "You would never get a job doing that!"
2. Academic ability, because universities designed the system in their image.
The consequences are that many highly intelligent, brilliant, creative people think they're not. We have to try to change this. According to UNESCO in the next thirty years more people will be graduating through education than ever before. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Twenty years ago if you had a degree you had a job. But now many people with degrees are unemployed because a job that used to require a BA now requires an MA and so on. This process of academic inflation is indicative of the fact that the whole process of education is shifting beneath our feet. In my view we need to rethink our idea of intelligence.
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