It’s Time to Change How We Learn: Future of Education

Western mass education, in the form most of us will recognise, was designed to solve a specific problem. Industrialisation needed workers who could show up reliably, follow sequences, absorb standardised information, and operate within hierarchies without too much friction. The school system delivered exactly that, and it did it extraordinarily well for a very specific kind of economy. We have bells that mark transitions, and desks all facing forward in uniform lines. Knowledge moved in one direction from teacher to student, and the whole structure was oriented around producing a certain kind of person for a certain kind of labour market.

But the economy has changed, and our technology has transformed the nature of work repeatedly. The skills that mattered have shifted so many times underneath everyone’s feet across the decades. And yet the underlying philosophy of education has stayed almost entirely intact. But we got a few upgrades… we had computers installed with internet access, and then a few digital literacy modules bolted onto the periphery. But the core assumption still held that learning is something that happens to you, in a building, in a prescribed sequence, from someone certified to deliver it, until you receive a document that says you are ready to begin your real life and enter the job market. That assumption is still running most of our institutions. It is just that the world it was built for no longer exists.

But What Happens If We Remove the Constraints?

If you let yourself think past the current scaffolding, something interesting is given space to emerge. The features of learning that research consistently shows actually work, such as belonging, agency, curiosity as a trained reflex rather than a lucky accident, are not particularly expensive or technically complex to cultivate. They just require a different set of priorities, not a bigger budget. A child whose excitement is met rather than managed learns differently, and a student who feels their identity and background are welcomed in the room thinks more freely. A learner who has experienced the real consequences of a real choice in a safe environment carries something forward that no amount of theoretical instruction can produce.

So what would it look like to orient an entire educational philosophy around those things? We believe that intensive, one-year, practical master's programmes that are built around application rather than lecture would open up learning for all ages. Research access is opened to people working independently or within industry, so that learning becomes something you return to throughout a career rather than something you escape from at the end of your twenties.

And for younger learners, a systematic practice of building from whatever already lights them up, rather than trying to force their curiosity into the shape of a curriculum. These are not utopian proposals, as some of them are already happening in scattered, underfunded corners of the educational landscape. The question is whether institutions will choose to scale them, or whether, as with Dumbledore's Army, the people who need them will simply build them anyway.

The Permission To Follow What You’re Curious About

The graduates of today know that something is broken. But there is another story sitting underneath the one about broken institutions, and it may be the more important. The skills that humanities training, when done well, actually develops are precisely the ones that are hardest to automate. Things like judgment, the ability to hold complexity and communicate it to other humans, contextual understanding, ethical reasoning, and the capacity to read a room; to sense what is missing from a conversation, to make meaning from things that resist easy categorisation. These are not soft skills in the diminishing sense that word usually carries. They are foundational capacities for navigating a world that is genuinely uncertain, and they are becoming more valuable as the tasks surrounding them get absorbed by machines.

Graduates today who focus on studying what lights them up (such as humanities students) may well be among the people most likely to flourish in what comes next. But they’re often the ones who have been told that what they study is pointless. So why have we made it so difficult for people to arrive at that understanding for themselves, and what would it take to build a world where the permission to believe it does not have to come from external validation at all?

We dive further in this week’s podcast episode: