I want to know why

I was always one of those kids who always wanted to know why.

I’m sure I drove my parents insane, always wanting to know the reasons why we did the things we did (or didn’t), and who came up with the idea in the first place. It was never enough for me to just ‘do’ the thing, I needed to know why I was doing it and what it might lead to.

I’ve never really changed – all through school I oscillated between trying to work out why I had to study chemistry (which I did not enjoy), and sinking into this sort of state of learned hopelessness, where I went through the motions and ticked the boxes without actually absorbing anything.

It wasn’t until I changed schools when I was about 15 that things started to turn around – being able to choose what I studied gave me a sense of control and agency, and I had chosen things that were connected to the careers I was interested in at the time. I still asked why all the time, but at least I moved away from the learned hopelessness bit.

Shifting forward to today, and I still want to know why.

Why do we choose the jobs we do, and why do we engage (or not engage) with them?

Why do we educate our young people, and not just like ‘because it’s good for them’, but what do we want them to get out of it? And what do we want them to do with the skills and knowledge we teach?

I want to know why we talk about jobs the way we do, and why do we fixate on some jobs and ignore others?

And I want to know these things because if we understand the why, the reason behind what we do, then it’s so much easier to work out the what.

Instructional Designers working on new learning programs do this all the time – they use models like the ADDIE model or SAM to start with the end in mind. They ask things like, what do we want our learners to be able to do, and why do we want them to be able to do this? Who are our learners, and how can we design learning that will support and engage them? Instructional Designers know to centre the learner within the learning process as the most fundamental part of their needs analysis, before a single lesson plan is written.

But we’ve been educating our children in schools for so long that we no longer go back to basics – we simply iterate and adjust what we already do.

It still works for the majority of students. They gain skills and knowledge which they can then use to live successful, productive lives and participate in the workforce, but it doesn’t work for all students, and it’s possible to say that it doesn’t work well for most students.

You can use whichever model you like to assess the ‘success’ of our education system – how many students complete schooling? How long does it take them to find a job once they leave school? How much do they earn in their careers? But I feel that one of the most accurate methods of measurement is to look at how engaged we are once we leave school. Each year, Gallup produce a State of the Global Workplace report and one of the things they investigate is engagement, which remains stubbornly low across the world. The fact is, that no matter how you measure success, the vast majority of us aren’t engaged with (and don’t enjoy) the work that we do.

And my question is, how can an education system be successful if the majority of people who leave it don’t find work they can engage with?

In this project, I want to learn more about why we educate our children the way we do, and how we got here. I also want to look at how we choose the work we do, and how this has changed over time.

From this, I hope that we can draw some insights about what’s working, and what’s not, and what we can do moving forward.