Gahey, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.

Here's a dangerous idea for you.

What if we are educating children all wrong?

President Trump has lately been floating the idea of abolishing the Department of Education

in the United States.

And indeed, in the US and many countries, test

scores are either stagnant or they're going backwards. Boys in particular are falling behind.

There are more and more attention deficit issues in the classroom. We seem to be testing a lot

and not necessarily going anywhere. Today's guest has a completely revolutionary idea

about how we should be educating children. He's from Finland, which as you may know, is the

world's best country when it comes to student test scores. And it largely got there by not testing

children relentlessly and not focusing so narrowly on academic achievement, but by trying to think about

what school is like from the perspective of the child. When you think about it, the way that we

arrange schools in most of the Western world is inherited from a kind of industrial revolution

era when everybody went to work in factories

and we started funneling children, the ones who could afford it at least, into classrooms

that looked and behaved and smelled a little bit like factories. And we churned out these

widgets called children to become productive workers for essentially an industrial economy.

We now live in an information economy. We now live in an information

economy. We now live in a world that's a lot more complicated where the careers that

children are going to have are going to be a lot more uncertain and require a lot more nimbleness.

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