Five tell-tale, horrific signs reveal that: today’s school system isn’t educating. They are: gang culture among disaffected youth, an appalling amount of mental ill-health among the young, a chronic skills shortage, a sluggish 2008-2019 recovery, and a prevalence of ridiculous conspiracy theories on social media. These things should not be happening if schools were successfully socialising their cohorts into confident, capable, civilised, behaviour… hand-in-hand with cool, probing, critical judgment.
So we have the nightmare situation that a conspicuously mis-educational school regime has been the accepted status quo for four decades. The most difficult problem is that of trying to see how such a deeply entrenched aberration could ever be reversed. There are many natural scruples against discussing the possibility of total change in schooling: teachers need all the confidence and authority they can muster. The last thing anyone coping with difficult classes wants is a rumour that the whole current structure might be on the skids. This mantra <<Don’t, whatever you do, rock the boat!>> has, in effect, kept today’s school mis-managerialism in business since the 1980s.