Good Luck With Education!

Mr. Branson asks:

Should the education system change to reflect
the new dynamics of entrepreneurship?

He, together with many others, is voicing that the education system in the UK is failing in its objectives in a time of change. This is not only true in the UK, so my response is general.

My response doesn't address any specific changes he advocates or enters into a public dialogue. I’m answering only his question above and with naive optimism, not that he will read this, but that education could ever be as described below.

Dear Sir Richard,

I wish that I had been taught some business skills in my school days and learned about compound interest early on.

Joking aside, understanding how business works is useful for anyone. We are CEOs of our own lives and families (at least we should be on the board) and seeing your life and family as a business can be a useful metaphor. Business skills are handy to have in any case.

But what if entrepreneurship is essentially an ideology and in raising it on a pedestal we risk locking ourselves into a scenario that may not bring the greatest good for the greatest number of people in the long term? Entrepreneurship may not the only way! Ah, too radical.

But entrepreneurship is definitely a lens through which we can view the future of work and the way we create value in a society. Any new dynamic is not unique to entrepreneurship. New dynamics are everywhere. They don’t make entrepreneurship special, which is obvious if you’re not looking through that lens.

Society is transforming. It’s why we talk about the future of work. Things are going to be radically different. We get that.

But rather than molding people into a specific mode of thinking, like “2015 era entrepreneurship”, it would be more useful to understand what education and entrepreneurship are for, if we're determined to change a centuries-old system based on some recent fads in entrepreneurship. Perhaps there are other, equally or even more important or useful values that could be covered to “prep” our kids for their imminent future.

One thing is for sure, there are some universal truths. And we can work with that!

Change

For example. Things will continue to change and those who can adapt (best) will survive (better). Only evolution deniers and some stubborn old-boys will disagree.

This means we shouldn't teach skills with an expiration date, but strategies for adaptation, opportunistic skilling abilities, and perhaps more acceptance of the fact that quite a proportion of people are generalists, neurologically, not out of laziness or rebelliousness.

Failure

We should teach that failure is the primary mechanism for learning and transformation (i.e. progress). Yes, failing good, fast and cheap is part of this new startup “dynamic”, so we could use it to showcase the ways of failure.

We should teach that all things fail, eventually, and that we can prepare for failure and respond intelligently. We should “bake in” failure so that it doesn't surprise people so much each time.

Agency

We should instill the idea of agency, that we are in charge of ourselves and our future through our choices, and that knowing how to (re)write our personal narratives is one of the best ways to meet the future successfully and in good mental health.

If we're going to live in a better world, in a well-functioning society, we have to do things differently than we are doing now. Changes that are happening in the world will affect all aspects of our lives and the environment we live in. And they will do so radically and indiscriminately.

Sustainability

This is why we're suddenly so eager to enter a sustainability paradigm. Better late than never! We should teach kids resilience, self-reliance, dealing with loss and rejection and foster grit, on a personal level, as well as ecological thinking on a global level. It’s not just poor people in developing countries who need to learn this. Everyone does!

It might be useful to look at the Sustainable Development Goals and wonder how and why these are being established. School curricula could benefit from some SDG mining, as well as businesses and organizations that wish to stay relevant. We need to learn how to make choices that are compatible with the SDG, with a future we want, and it starts in the classroom.

Storytelling

In general, kids need to learn how to think critically, how to ask the right questions, how to make sense of the world, how to tell stories and form a narrative of their culture and of themselves and to understand the narratives of others and other cultures. It’s about storytelling and comprehension, the basic cognitive skills that humans have, but that need to be taught explicitly in a modern time where social structures have disintegrated and taken new forms.

Kids need to learn the narratives of history and the reason for why things may be the way they are (and that most things are really hypotheses or stories from different viewpoints, and that it can be useful to entertain multiple truths at the same time, to be skeptical, yet curious).

Empathy

Last, but not least, they need to learn empathy and that people are different and, knowing how you, yourself, are different and unique early on will help you a lot throughout life. It means differences should be celebrated, not stigmatized.

What we need to get rid of, mostly, is rote learning and homework. For facts and calculators, there is the Internet. Topography and geography are great, but map-literacy, geology, and climatology are more relevant. Where does (will) water come from?

To answer your question “Should the education system change to reflect the new dynamics of entrepreneurship?” I would answer: a balanced view of the new dynamics in entrepreneurship could provide useful illustrations and skills in the greater scheme of things.

Good luck!

Update:

A week after this response was published, two articles have appeared on Richard Branson’s timeline on LinkedIn:

• Should schools be a looking glass into the future, is guest post that centers around technology and takes inspiration from Steve Jobs.
  It says kids need to be able to play and experiment, rather than just learn facts.

“Sometimes it’s easy to think that change is the only constant in life…”

“What we may need to do is rethink fundamentally what a school is”

• In It’s time to tell everyone about the Global Goals he explains the Sustainable Development Goals and tells us that everyone will need to learn about them as soon as possible and act where they are with what they have:

“find your focus and act.”

At least this gives me some hope that any influence he will have on educational systems will not be only through the lens of entrepreneurship.

If you like this article, please recommend it to help others find it!

You might also like to read The Beating Heart of Simplicity about the danger of oversimplification in storytelling.