Tag: revolution

Education – it’s a 21st Century fail

Posted on by philipdodson

Education – It’s a 21st Century fail

old school

20% of the jobs today didn’t exist 5 years ago, self-employment is on a global hockey stick growth curve, we’re living through the biggest revolution since the industrial one – a digital revolution.

We’ve moved from an industrial age into a digital ideas economy, there is a rising collaborative sharing economy and there is the ever growing and more powerful connected generation. We have an increasing number of social enterprises and people are looking at life very differently.

People are turning their backs on the old world capitalist model, turning their backs on consumption, turning away from the world order of yesterday.

However, how are we preparing the next generations for this new world, how are we equipping the children of today to face this new age?

By largely serving them up the same old out-dated stuff that has been served up for decades. Education in the developed world is largely failing to prepare our young for the world they will be facing.

Giant state run education factories, preparing children to jump through meaningless government imposed hoops, in a typical party political lead box ticking exercise. That will all be undone and changed in a few years time when the other lot take over the reigns of power.

Then you have private independent schools perpetuating the privileged class as they desperately cling on to a Victoriana Imperial world of times gone by.

The net result is the connected generation of today’s youth are bored, disenfranchised and are being sold woefully short of a proper preparation for their lives ahead. In fact not just the millenials, but I would say anyone who has been educated from 1970 onwards.

We need to move towards smaller community based local schools, we need to start properly bringing the digital revolution in to education.

Prepare them for being self-employed, after all 50% of the working population within 10 years will be. Prepare them to embraace social media and the internet, not try to scare them away from it. They are all using it anyway.

Bring coding in to education, teach them how to set up a company, run one, show them about opening a bank account, pensions, real life things.

Stop filling their heads with a chronological historical route march through time, stop teaching things they can look up on the internet.

Allow them to be truly creative, don’t teach them all the same, work out what they are good at and love doing and then help them to succeed in that.

This is not some utopian fluffy pipe dream – just need to stop party politics and open our minds that doing the same old, same old, will get the same poor results. Use imagination and harness children’s lack of fear and imaginations to create truly amazing things.

Bring in meditation, yoga, wellbeing and other proven things. Bring in partnerships with local businesses and other elements of the community.

Teach them all first aid for example, not by a teacher in a stuffy classroom, but get them to work with St John’s ambulance. FT (food technology), why not take them to a real live restaurant or a bakery to learn from experts.

Half of what they are taught is generic, out dated and to be honest they will never ever use.

Everyone needs a bank account, most will fill in a tax return, have a pension, may run a company, the list of real life practical things to teach is endless, yet none are taught.

Stop failing our society with old out dated rubbish and start teaching them what they need and start allowing them the true freedom to be creative.

I have recently been working with many young students and from all over the world – the theme is common with all, they are not being equipped for the world we live in and the world that is evolving.

Many are doing business degrees, yet they are not being shown or taught the most basic things about business or about being an entrepreneur.

So what to do? we all need to campaign for a change in the system and encourage others to do so. We need to get more integration between business people, community leaders and education.

We need to remove party politics from education and most other aspects to be honest. We need to help young people and give our knowledge and experience to them as business people, get involved in mentoring and coaching.

Things have to change.

Do you know what? We’ve been fed a crock of shit

Posted on by philipdodson

Do you know what? We’ve all been fed a big crock of shit.

The fact is that since the 1950s until now we’ve been sold the dream, but the dream is only for a very tiny few and in reality that dream is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

We’ve all been brought up to go to school, university – get good grades, then get a career, get promoted, get more money, get a bigger house, bigger car, a bigger TV, more expensive this and that.

We work for others all our lives, work as hard as we can, to consume more and more.

We then get to a certain age and retire. Next stop – death.

Well I’m out. That is no longer what a growing number of people worldwide want, yet the system still peddles that outdated nonsense. Why? Because it can’t survive if we don’t all do as we are told and keep consuming and working hard to follow that ‘dream’.

The sum total of our lives will be a chronological route march from one materialistic milestone to the next, with zero time for people and nothing more than a pile of credit card receipts and a heap of dissatisfaction that some other person has bigger and better stuff than us.

The only winners in this endless cycle of consumption are the select few – that top 1%, who globally have all the real wealth and power. Take a look at this if you need convincing more:





However, there is a choice and now is the time to act. It is the time to change and turn our backs and bypass this old school world that has shafted most of us all our lives.

Thanks to the internet and social media, we can now ignore that old world and pursue the dreams that we have and live a life that is not measured in shallow terms such as money and material goods. We can collaborate with others, help others, share ideas and work for the things that really matter in life – happiness and people.

If you choose the path of worshipping things and money, then you will be forever chasing that unfulfilling dream that only keeps a very select few holding all the power, many of whom are not happy anyway.

It’s time to start living the life that you want and not what others want you to live. Don’t work 9-5 for somebody else’s dream.

Start your own thing, chase your dream and share and work with others to achieve theirs too. If we share our resources with others, i.e. share our knowledge capital, then this will start to take away the power that the top 1% holds.

The next decade can be one of the most defining periods in history – a chance to use the power of the internet, social media, collaboration and really embrace the sharing economy and the change that is possible.

Become part of it, become part of the connected generation, embrace the ideas of helping others, understand abundance and measure prosperity in terms of people not money.

We stand at the fork in the path, one way is real change, where finally the old order is challenged and people are truly put first. The other is to continue along the path of consumerism, capitalism, where you will be a drone forever, unsatisfied, chasing a dream that is a crock of shit.