The thing is we're not particularly sure what we want from it

The aim of education should be to prepare us for the challenges of adult life

Yet from this perspective it's clear that schools fail all but a tiny portion of their students

Whether in highly academic private schools

Or in deprived government-run ones, trouble-dealing with life's challenges

remains very widespread indeed

Human ingenuity, energy, goodwill, and talent

is being lost on an industrial scale

to get more ambitious about education doesn't necessarily mean spending more money

building more schools, employing more teachers, or making exams more difficult

Rather, it should mean focusing more on the real purpose of education

There are two fundamental tasks it should help us with: working and sustaining good relationships

In order to address these needs a future national curriculum might specify

that the following subjects be studied

Firstly, capitalism

A conspiracy of silence exists around the economic system we live within

We find it hard to change its bad sides or defend its strengths

because we simply don't fully understand how it works

A subject like maths should be geared to teaching its number one utility for 99% of the population

dealing with money

Such classes would demystify the global economy

by teaching students the importance of the means of production and how profits are made

The role of cashflow, HR leadership, marketing, and competition would also be studied

In a perfect school system, you'd also then study a really big second subject

yourself

Young students would be introduced to the idea that we humans

are extremely prone to misunderstanding ourselves

They would be taken through the concepts of delusion, defensiveness

projection and denial in everyday life

Individual tutors would be on hand to help students toward personality maps

with particular attention paid to their neuroses and fears

Doing this would ensure that students learn a lot

about how complex they truly are

and what types of people they would be best suited to hang out with

A crucial unit would be devoted to career self-knowledge

What job are you best suited to?

Students would spend three hours a week

exploring what they might do with their futures

Then we would study relationships

Being intensely aware of the social and individual cost of every unhappy relationship

An ideal education system would emphasize

the acquisition of skills that help people

to live better together

There would be units on kindness and forgiveness

as well as on anxiety reduction techniques

In this educational utopia, it wouln't only be children who would go to school

but adults as well

Schooling would be for life

Education wouldn't just be taking place in classrooms

media and the arts would be made to maximize their teaching potential

and help to teach people what they actually need to learn

We're so hung up on the challenges of running a massive education system

we're failing to pinpoint the real source of its problems

These are primarily about money, salaries, or discipline

These are only a consequence of a more fundamental problem

Right now and with no one quite meaning for this to happen

we've simply got the wrong curriculum