The school bus

For many students, being at school is like being in a bus.

• It is an essentially passive experience.
• The route is pre-planned.
• The timetable is preplanned.
• Someone else does the driving.
• They don't have to concentrate.
• They sit and chat, or stare out of the window.

Driving yourself in a car is a completely different experience!

• You might look at a map, but you decide where you are going.
• You also decide when to start and when to finish your journey.
• You can stop and take a break if you want.
• You can take a detour if you decide there is something you want to investigate.
• You have to concentrate hard!

Young people really, really want to learn to drive. They will pay hundreds of pounds to learn.

Driving represents freedom and personal choice.

Pupils would be more motivated and concentrate harder if schools were less like buses and more like cars.

The Subway Curriculum

The Subway menu  offers two sizes, 5 breads, 17 fillings, each with cheese or no cheese, each toasted or not toasted, any selection of 8 salad fillings and 7 sauces. When I enter a Subway I am faced with a choice of one sub from an awesome 191,923,200 possibilities.

Imagine if a pupil could walk into a class and be given that range of choice. 

Actually that is only 1,920 possible choices. But it would be a start.

In a talk to the RSA, Sir Ken Robinson has pointed that we model our schools on factories; the most important feature of a pupil is his age, which Sir Ken calls "the date of manufacture". We teach batches. Our quality control is built around the model of standardisation: teachers have to follow a prescribed curriculum using recommended pedagogies; students are expected to meet targets set on the basis of what other students of their age are meeting.

On another talk (to TED in 2010) Sir Ken says "We have built our education systems on the model of fast food". But what we offer pupils is worse than that. Subway trumps school.