This is true. However, that aspect of our nature is not necessarily to the
fore during "school age". Children need to learn how to learn from birth,
and that is the crucial role or nursery and primary education. But from
12-14 onwards, as children's eyes turn to the wider world, they are perhaps
best prepared by giving them wide exposure to the conditions they are
likely to face immediately, plus a road-map which tells them how to learn
more as and when they need more. Once out into the world young people will
find questions to which they want answers. This real motivation to learn
means education delivered later will have more impact. (I assume,
idealistically, that opportunities for later, life-long learning are in
fact to be put in place.)
The policy implication is that an emphasis on life-long learning may go
hand-in-hand with a restructuring of the last years at school: down-grading
the delivery of a curriculum of knowledge and upgrading the teaching of
social skills and the "road-map" of how to learn more under one's own
steam.
Iain Osborne
iain_osborne@mckinsey.com
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