Chapter One The Education Perspective

The Education Perspective

Lucy Stevens The New School

James Scroggs New Working Class Andy Boucher ESMA

Aliyah York Pupil Power

In a conversation about the power of education, One Question began with the education system itself.

“The education system is built on a deficit model: You don’t have what is required to be successful in the world, so we’re going to teach you, and somebody at the front of the class fills you up with knowledge. […] We come at this from an asset-based model, which is asking, What have you already got in your DNA, or in your background, or in your experience, that we can build upon?” James Scroggs

Widely understood to underpin any number of societal structures, inducting children into a chain of tasks and tests that are designed to equip them for the world of work and adulthood, schooling – from nursery to university – will be the first thing that springs to mind for many when faced with 2022’s central question. Faced with the revelation that our current system fails a third of students, the efficacy and ethics of traditional education have been thrown into question.

Student Aliyah York started Pupil Power to correct the deficits she saw in the current education system. For instance, so-called “soft” skills, like communication and relationships, might be harder to quantify than exam scores – but after two years of disrupted learning and digital rather than in-person teaching, it’s these interpersonal skills that have suffered most acutely.

What does education equip us for? What are the metrics we consider most valuable, and how do we measure them? For young people who feel that their social class has more impact on their success than their education, and business owners grappling with high-achievers ill-equipped for the world of work, the status quo is falling short on myriad fronts.

Confronted by the glaring absence of less tangible but no less imperative learning, people in and outside the education system have had no choice but to expand their definition of the category. With the value of more holistic and experiential knowledge more apparent than ever, thought leaders on the panel and beyond are proposing new systems that do away with the distinction between education and business for altogether more integrated – and mutually beneficial – experiences.

Education and society are inextricably linked, each directly influencing the other. While business might be understood as the ultimate beneficiary of schooling, that transaction could stand to be refined or even reversed entirely. “I’m currently at an age when I’m asking, What does a CV look like? What are you guys looking for? Because from my schooling experience, it’s just my grades that matter – but employers need their young people with the ability to communicate and all the other skills that we class as soft skills, but that I would say were principal, essential skills.” Aliyah York

“The minute we stick with asking for top grades as the ticket through, we limit education and limit what we can do together. So for me, the ask would be collaborating on alternative outcomes that are useful and interesting to us, that we want to see coming through the system.” Lucy Stevens