Educating our children

I do not know whether this is actually a quote by “Richard Feynman” or just that someone has a attributed it to him…… but it resonates so accurately with what I see at the moment as a parent of Teenagers.

Our classic education system teaches our children through subjects that will never be used by the majority of them, the level and depth of detail that our children are taught in subjects such as Math and Science etc are useless to all but the 5% that choose a profession that may not even exist in its current form in the next 10-15 years.

My 14 year old daughter recently showed me her “career” day results, based on testing her aptitude in various subjects she takes at school. I can not argue with the personality classification for her as it is based on the Myers Briggs personality assessment, but the resulting career choices are stuck in the 70s! (1870s!)….

• Art curator – come on…. how many Art curation roles are there?
• Museum officer – wow there must be a big queue for this job!

There were several others but I do not have the list in front of me so I would not be accurate if I was to try and remember the other role, suffice to say they are mostly not at all jobs that are likely anymore, except:

• Data Analyst – lol, not to disparage the Data Analysts I know but I can not imagine being excited about a career in Analysing Data at 14 years of age.

This is not the schools fault, the school when running a 24+ to 1 ratio of Students to teachers can not be relevant to the full class. As parents we have to fill this void by providing the opportunity for children to learn about entrepreneurship, to learn how to find a job and to want to work.

Worse than the above is that School work is in many cases harder than we as adults experience in our careers, why is this? as adults are we trying to drown our children in information that again is not relevant to most of them?

So what we do for our daughter is to provide her with affirmation and support ,so she knows that her abilities – which are very strongly in the creative space will allow her to be very successful in many areas of business.

The Fact is that what she (and most of the class) is learning at school will not be useful for her as an adult and this is true for most children, education needs to be driven much more towards what the child wants to learn (with guidance) than along a set curriculum based on modifications to an education system from the 1800s.

It is my belief that rather than allowing the schools to dictate to us as parents what happens with our children’s education, we as parents must start being much more active in what our children learn at school and to provide the balance to what their educators are telling them.

Ask your child what they want to do when they grow up and the answer might surprise you…….