Book Nook: Forget School - Why Young People Are Succeeding On Their Own Terms And What Schools Can Do To Avoid Being Left Behind

As a society, we have decided that school is necessary and so we make attendance compulsory. At school, children’s suitability for the adult world is decided by tests that measure a fairly narrow range of their capacities. Exams have become all-consuming, when in reality they should be no more than an indication of how things are going with a child’s education. Teachers, meanwhile, just need children to pass exams so that they can keep their jobs.

We still look to measure student achievement by what the pupil ‘knows’ and by how much they can retain and remember, but new technology has made this approach to learning virtually redundant. We all have the information at our fingertips. Similarly, we are failing to properly educate our young, but we seem to be getting away with it because the young are educating themselves through the new technological opportunities that they have.

Children are expected to serve the school, not the other way round. This is because the school has to compete with the one down the road for a label that says it is a success. When children leave school, they have formed lifelong opinions about how clever they are. Most have decided that they are not. The signs indicating that the young have lost respect for schooling are everywhere. They have learnt the limited value of the curriculum and its associated tests and they are turning their backs on the whole thing. Schools are at a crossroads: respond to the real world of change, challenges and possibilities that face our young, or become irrelevant.

What is important now is that we build an educational system that places less value on declarative knowledge (retaining information) and more on procedural knowledge (the capacity to make use of that information). Children’s ‘poor’ behaviour is fundamentally telling us that they are uncomfortable with the current curriculum – not because it is unfamiliar and difficult but because it is clear that it does not match their needs. We must do something about this.

In Forget School: Why young people are succeeding on their own terms and what schools can do to avoid being left behind, Martin Illingworth draws on the experiences of young self-employed adults to shed light on how young people perceive school’s current provision, and offers insights into what they think needs to change if education is to work for generations to come. The book provides practical suggestions around how schooling culture, curriculum design and pedagogical approaches can be reconfigured in readiness for the emerging shifts and trends in 21st century life and employment.

“In choosing to write about what I see as the real crisis in education, I am seeking to support the work of teachers. Teachers remain the only real stable resource in the classroom and their work is as vital as ever. I have been a schoolteacher and educator for a long time and I am frustrated by the ways in which educating children is constantly being taken out of our hands. I am an insider who thinks that we all need a wake-up call and that those best placed to deliver it are our children.”