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What’s the most important goal of an education system? For too many people, Richard Gerver says, it’s examination – the linear, simplistic, industrial method of sorting people into different pigeonholes, based on how much information they can retain and reproduce at will. Yet the global economy is now entering a phase in which so-called “soft skills” are becoming hard currency. We should be educating our kids in a way that maximises their creative potential, when instead we’re crushing the imagination out of them from the age of five.

“I am going to make you sit a test,” said Gerver early in this presentation to the London Business Forum (LBF) at the Lewis Media Centre. At this, a soft groan passed around the room, each of us fretting that our ignorance might be exposed. Gerver is the progenitor of a teaching method that won worldwide acclaim through UNESCO. Suddenly, we were struggling to recall all the facts we could from our childhood, amid the foggy memories of pointless, soperific, uninspiring lessons. The questions he asked us were as follows, and you can find the answers at the bottom of this review:

1. What figure of speech describes Tennyson’s the “murmuring of innumerable bees”?
2. Who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
3. What is the name for a triangle whose sides are all of different lengths?
4. What are the other three trigonometric functions apart from sine, tangent and cosine?
5. Where in the human body are the carpals?
6. What did Dmitri Mendeleev devise in 1889?
7. Whose law states that a constant temperature of the pressure of a gas is inversely combustible to its volume?
8. King Richard I belonged to which royal house?
9. In what year was the French Revolution?
10. In which country is Mount Kilimanjaro?
11. What is the Greek goddess Artemis goddess of?
12. Who wrote the opera The Barber of Seville?

“I got these questions,” Gerver revealed, “from a book that I found in an airport lounge called I Used to Know That, by Caroline Taggart… In the introduction, she said, ‘When I started to compile this book, I realised that 90% of everything I’ve learned in school, I’ve forgotten.”

The reason that Taggart and the rest of us forget what we learn at school is that, at the time we’re forced to learn it, we can’t see the point of doing so, and in any case very little of the formal curriculum has any practical usefulness in our adult lives (especially not in today’s tumultuous, globalised economic landscape).

“I don’t think [the members of the UK government] have a clarity of vision for our education system,” Gerver complained. “I think they live in a world where they react in the short term to a series of issues. That’s why, for example, since the inception of the National Curriculum in 1989, we have had over 600 new initiatives in schools. It’s no wonder that among educators there is huge confusion and a massive resentment of the ‘strategy’.” What’s more, Gerver added, very little government thinking on education seems to be joined up.

It was for these reasons and many others that Gerver chose to frame his duty as a teacher in a different way: “My moral purpose was simply to prepare my children for their futures,” he told us earnestly, “in a way that would be exciting and dynamic and forward-thinking. So that actually they would grow up with self-confidence and belief, and a series of skills and abilities that would allow them not just to survive, but to thrive.”

Children’s engagement in education would improve dramatically if they were only given a feeling of ownership over the education system, Gerver argued. To illustrate this point, he cited a book called The School I’d Like, written by Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, who recently surveyed young people between the ages of 3 and 18 across the country. The authors asked their interviewees what they felt was wrong with their schools, and what the schools of the 21st Century should be like.

The perception shown by these children was incredible. For example, 16-year-old Kirsty said: “In my ideal school, we will no longer be treated like an identical herd of wild animals waiting to be civilised for the outside world. People will realise that it’s our world too.” It’s true that we do tend to process children industrially, Gerver said. And it’s worth bearing in mind that this isn’t the best way to produce innovative thinkers.

Meanwhile, a precocious 8-year-old called Toby, whom Gerver met at a National College of School Leadership event, had this to say about his experience of school: “I’m sick of learning about second-hand stuff. What I want is to learn stuff that nobody’s learnt before. I want to feel I've discovered something.” When Gerver thought about this remark, he realised that going to school was indeed like going to the shops, if you regarded children as consumers of knowledge. Going to school, he suggested to the LBF audience, is like shopping at a second-hand shop all the time, where you’ll only find hand-me-downs and nothing genuinely new or exciting. This has major implications for class discipline, he added, since much bad behaviour stems from boredom.

Now is the time to debate such issues, because the global job market is changing so rapidly. Referring to his young son Andrew, Gerver pointed out that: “somewhere between 60-80% of the jobs that are going to exist when Andrew reaches adult employable age don’t yet exist.” What’s more, he said, Andrew will probably work for between 18 and 25 organisations during his lifetime, whereas people retiring today have only worked for between three and five. Indeed, the majority of Andrew’s generation will be self-employed. “That immediately sets a massive challenge in terms of the kind of person Andrew is going to have to be, because the stability of getting a job is no longer a certainty of going through the standard academic process.”

Until very recently, a university degree was regarded as a guaranteed way to get a good job. But, Gerver revealed, “one-third of students that left university this last summer still don’t have a graduate level job or full-time gainful employment [and] over 40% of blue-chip companies today – a figure that’s rising rapidly – will tell you that the degree is no longer a major criterion on a person’s CV for job selection.”

This is why educators should be shifting their priority radically to creative skills, Gerver suggested. Creativity isn’t a binary state; all kids are creative. Yet the sharp decline of creativity in the over-fives is a phenomenon that has been observed all over the world. This is why, Gerver said, “I think the best-run early-years units are the finest models of learning at any level of education anywhere… What you see in a well-run early-years unit are resilient, self-confident children who are working independently and in teams. They are negotiating with one another. They are investigating. They are not waiting to be told what to do or what’s right or what’s wrong. And they are doing it with humour and love and interest and dynamism.”

Our number-one challenge as a society is “to make learning matter for our kids”, Gerver concluded. “I’m sorry: it is not enough to tell children that school is important, that ‘you’ll just have to believe me and when you are older you will know what I am talking about.’” Rather, he suggested, we have to apply de facto marketing techniques, to sell the idea of an educational lifestyle that children will buy into.

Consider Harley-Davidson, the motorcycle manufacturer, he said. “It’s the brand that people sign up to, not the vehicle… I hate a lot of the advertising industry and what they have done to our children. But I have to say I admire them enormously too, because if we understood our kids half as well as they understood our kids, we would be able to create an education system that really matters.”

Answers

1. Onomatopoeia
2. Harriet Beecher
3. Scalene
4. Cosecant, secant, cotangent
5. The wrist
6. The periodic table of elements
7. Boyle’s Law
8. Plantagenet
9. 1789
10. Tanzania
11. Hunting and the Moon
12. Rossini