I was reading The New Statesman in the train the other day, in which could be found some fabulous opinion pieces by people whom I would probably classify as British intellectuals. One piece was by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, as thoughtful a man as you might ever meet. He was opining on the necessary uses of education for a modern society in which critical thinking skills and the capacity for deeper reflection might be held in a higher regard.

He wrote,

..we need to ask what our education system should do to nurture intelligence about citizenship, which is ultimately intelligence about human behaviour and language; human collaboration about making a shared world. A system that is obsessed with skills and their marketability, that is interested mostly in problem solving, educates, at best, half the brain. The sense of shared human project needs a lot more resource from the worlds of imagination, sympathy, faith in all its forms, conventional and unconventional."

I have lamented at this blog before, though with far less erudition than Dr Williams, the current obsession with skill-driven outcomes as the only meaningful measure of educational progress. Skills are important and yes, they do need to be measured somehow, but they are only a part of the story. I would like to see philosophy and comparative religion jostling with science and maths for the attention of young people, amongst many other disciplines. Of course, the syllabus is already crowded out with a lot of subjects, but why should school be 9 to 3 five days a week? 

There are new ways of engaging that make more choice possible. Let's throw out the one shoe fits all outlook. After all, for every ten bankers, there should be at least one paid philosopher.