Tag: community

We don’t need no education

Posted on by philipdodson

We don’t need no education

no education

Education throughout most of the developed world is an utter failure, that we would be better off without.

It needs to be started again, completely from scratch.

Most schools are giant state education factories, churning children through an impersonalised, government statistic satisfying and out-dated system.

The system is teaching them often outdated stuff, not relevant to the world we live in now, often relevant to a world that no longer exists.

Getting them to obtain as high a grade as possible, in meaningless tests and exams, setting them based on these results, in order to ensure that the ‘brightest’ children are put in the highest sets with the best teachers. So that they can ensure the best results possible, to tick boxes and satisfy government set standards.

If I was put in charge of education of children for their future lives, I would start with looking at what they really needed for life. Life skills not subjects.

I would do away with all subjects, I would do away with all tests and all exams. I would get rid of sets, I would remove any form of grading children or labelling them. I would encourage a culture of worthiness, that we are all already worthy as individuals and we should never be judged on what we achieve, how much stuff we’ve done or grades we got in a one-off test.

We need to take shaming out of society and the best place to start is at school. My daughter recently suffered the shaming of being put down a set in science, after 3 years in the top set, she was put down a set because of the results of one test. She was told that it will enable her to improve be being in a lower set. She only feels inferior and not encouraged to improve. She was also taken away from friends.

Education is the biggest shaming experience that all of us have to suffer and often it scars us for life in terms of self-confidence. For example art is one of the worst in terms of effecting our confidence in later life, along with PE. Often from peers and teachers ridiculing us for our art or sporting ability.

I would make schools much smaller, personalised, locally based and much more entwined with local businesses, communities and people. Then children can stay at the same school from early age to the end, so that a real bond and understanding can develop between children and teachers.

I would reduce the time that children spent learning and I would not force them to be stuck in old school style classrooms for hours and hours. I would incorporate much more physical activity, outdoor time and much more creative/play time. Children would start school at later age of 6-7 not at 3.

I would then look at what interested individual children and tailor learning around them and what they enjoyed to do. I would make the learning much more creative and I would introduce much more technology and interactiveness into teaching.

I would teach children about values and get them to understand the importance of knowing their values and showing them how important it is to be true to them.

I would also look to teach children about self-awareness and self-improvement. I would teach them about wellness, meditation and the importance of having a healthy mind and body.

Then I would put as number one on the agenda the importance of happiness in life and work towards ensuring that all of the children and people involved focussed on that above anything else.

I would then look at the physical environment to ensure that where children learnt and did activities was open plan, with lots of natural light, comfortable and bright. The space would need to be set out to encourage collaboration and to allow children to feel safe and feel at home.

I would look at teaching children about the world not from the perspective of the old school nations, races, religions, wars and all the stuff that has been carved into all of our brains. I would start off by teaching them that we are all human beings and that we are all part of the same human race.

In terms of subjects, I would stop having the narrow based subjects that we have now, that are too rigid and not relevant to most of us and our real world lives. We are all taught ‘pie’ but I have yet to meet anyone who has used that in real life.

We need to prepare children for a world of freelancing and self-employment, as by 2020 more than half the developed world’s population will be self-employed.

So teach maths that is relevant to the real world, not old fashioned fractions, algebra and other stuff that we will never use.

Teach children to code, design, start a company, use social media, teach them how to open a bank account, fill in a tax return etc.

Also encourage much more creative learning through art, music, literature, drama and other elements that are simply a way of enriching our lives.

All to often children are being prepared to be good employees for corporations.

Start teaching children to be chasing their dreams not the dreams of others, encourage them to pursue what makes them happy.

When teaching them practical skills, then get them taught by people who actually do that skill in the real world. So instead of ‘food technology’ (aka cooking) being taught by a teacher, may be take them to a local restaurant kitchen to learn, take them to a local bakery to see how cakes are made and so on.

Get children used to the real world of life by allow partnership between the local organisations, businesses and people.

Education has to be radically changed and it takes a real radical solution to bring about the changes required. Otherwise we will find that children will become more and more disconnected and disenchanted with it and the world that they then enter when they leave.

I am sure many people will read this and think that this is all too fluffy and utopian. Many people want different results to what is currently being achieved from the education system we have, yet are not prepared to look at radical solutions.

All that happens is successive governments just tinker with the education system, kicking it around like a political football. Nothing radical has been done to change education since the 1800’s.

Time for a big shake up.

The changing workspace

Posted on by philipdodson

For centuries, for most of us, work has been associated with a physical space, now work for many has become an activity that you can do anywhere.

This is a much more significant change for the world than the one sentence it took to describe it.

Workplace

This fundamental change is and will have many impacts on our lives, from commuting, to working hours, family time, how we collaborate and communicate with others.

Human beings essentially thrive on being social and a big impact on our well being is being part of a community and having something to belong to. This for most of us was or still is, between 8 – 6 pm, if not longer, Monday to Friday, a company and a physical workplace, our own desk, pedestal, even for the few, our own offices.

There were people to interact with, people to share ideas, people to get support from, people to manage us and people to eat lunch with.

This environment for many in the rising world of self-employment has gone and has been replaced with mainly solitude.

Solitude at home, where after a prolonged period of this solitude, normally leads to a lack of motivation, a feeling of isolation and a good old dose of ‘cabin fever’.

Often the only interaction is with the cat/dog (delete where appropriate), you find daytime TV has crept in (we’ve all watched a bit of Jeremy Kyle), washing to put on, a trip to shops and if you’re like me a quick game on the PlayStation whilst eating lunch.

So often the freelancer, solo-preneur etc., ventures out in search of interaction, motivation and a break from the isolation. They typically head to a coffee shop, where there will be people and a place to work.

However, for those of us who have done the regular coffee shop caper, it’s poor Wi-Fi, too much coffee to ease the guilt, and noise. What you won’t get is any less distractions and you certainly won’t get any meaningful business interactions. Oh and the trip to the toilet means packing up the laptop and losing your seat.

If predictions of as many of 50% of us becoming self-employed within 10 years prove true, then there will be millions of us with this dilemia and need to do work other than at home or in a coffee shop.

The solution is co-working communities, where not only can you get a proper working environment, decent Wi-Fi, good coffee, but you can get the meaningful business interactions that you crave/need to succeed as a freelancer/entreprenuer etc.

Good co-working spaces will go a step further than just providing a desk to work from, they will have that real community, whereby serendiptiy thrives and those chance interactions lead to new ideas, new partners, new suppliers, new customers and just a person to share a bad/good day with.

This where the fundamental change starts to happen, as more and more of us start to work in these communities and experience the huge benefits that working around others brings to our businesses and ulitmately our soul. We will see a massive acceleration in the abandonment of the corporate paid for employment world.

Most importantly, we will see a shift from that old corporate world to a more prosperous collaborative world, where through a community working together, true sharing and helping will make work an activity that we all love, rather than for many of us, an activity we dislike.

We will become liberated from this 9-5 corporate machine that sucks us up from early in life until, once we are completely used, spits us out into retirement to wait to die.

This will change the face of our cities and communities too, as the current commercial real estate will be used very differently and we will see more residential communities being meshed together with working and educational hubs/communities. So that local communities can be re-formed.

We are living in exciting times, where we stand at a line now drawn in the sand, where back one way is the old school corporate/capitalist world and if we dare to step forward, is the collaborative, co-working, sharing world, where prosperity will be measured in relationships – putting people ahead of material wealth.