Our educational system may have been suitable for the twentieth century but is not suitable for the twenty-first century. It is not adequately preparing students for the future. It is not sufficiently catering for their diverse talents and interests, and it has been indoctrinating them with pseudo-intellectual concepts and rather than encouraging critical thinking it has been requiring a blind acceptance of pseudo-science. This needs radical change.
The world that is fast befalling us is one where there will be an abundance of cheap, very cheap, labour, and that’s for both blue- and white-collar work. This cheap labour comes in the form of Ai and robotics. The crucial question for us is, how do we best prepare the next generation for this world? Finding the answer is certainly not an easy exercise. It requires flexibility and agility and so is not suitable for central control, like our current one size fits all educational system.
Classic Liberals will significantly scale down education departments, decentralise education and allow education to meet the needs of the market. In line with this policy, every student will get an ‘educational voucher’ from government, which can be presented to any school or be used to fund home schooling. Schools will then effectively compete for both students and teachers. Schools will have the ability to negotiate salaries with individual teachers – on a teacher-by-teacher basis. A school may decide to pay some teachers more than others. Pay will therefore be determined by market forces.
If a traditional school decides to specialise to meet demand, it will be free to do so. Similarly, if an entrepreneur believes there to be a need for a specialist school, he or she will be permitted to establish such a school. This could, for example, be a technical school catering for those destined for work in the ‘trades’ or one that caters for those destined for work in information technology or robotics or one catering for artists or those more interested in humanities.
Schools receiving educational vouchers from students (vouchers provided by government), will be required to meet educational standards set by government. These will include foundational proficiency in mathematics, English literacy, geography, the rise and fall of ancient civilisations, major world religions and atheism, business (including accounting and marketing), and basic political ideologies. Schools will also be encouraged to develop critical thinking skills and creative minds.
It is imperative that we as a nation adequately prepare our children for the world that awaits them as adults. It is in all our interests that they prosper in the new social and economic environment that is unfolding, and since there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what that world will be, we need to ensure school leavers have a solid foundational knowledge and the ability to think critically and creatively. An educational system should also ignite the propensity of students to be curious. Curious people are constantly learning. They read widely, they explore, they question and they experiment. And the more people read, explore, question and think, the more interesting they will find the world, the better they will understand it, and the more likely it is that they will prosper in it.
Classic Liberals expects strong resistance from the teachers’ unions and so also from many teachers. To them it would say: a) it is not about what is best for you, it is about what is best for the students; b) if you don’t like it, find another job; and c) you would be wrong to assume you would be worse off. Your salaries may (or may not) increase, depending on what you teach, how good you are, and how many compete for the same job opportunity. You may also find far less of your time spent on unnecessary meetings, compliance, report writing and so on. It is also likely that teachers will be less troubled by unruly children, freeing them to do what inspired them to the profession – to help those who want to learn and inspire others to learn.