Does a minute go by when someone in the education world doesn’t utter that cliché about “preparing children for jobs that haven’t been invented yet”? And deliver it with that smug sanctimony that says “how lucky you are that I have had an original thought and am sharing it with you”? Except the thought isn’t original. After all, the Wright brothers hadn’t been trained as aeronautical engineers and John Logie Baird didn’t do a university TV and film course.

Change has always happened. Someone of my grandparents’ generation could well have fought in two world wars, remembered not only the early days of flight and television, but also of motor cars, talking pictures, wireless, antibiotics and nuclear energy. They could have gone on to experience long-haul air travel, benefit from routine transplant surgery and live long enough to send an email and order groceries online.

The point is not about change itself, but how we prepare young people for it. We have seemingly always done this badly. Almost 20 per cent of my first year at a comprehensive school in an industrial town in the English Midlands was spent learning technical drawing, a skill that we were told would prepare us for a good job in a local engineering firm. By the time I left school, all the draftsmen in those firms had been made redundant, their skills rendered obsolete by computers, and I was left to ponder all the wasted hours.

Systematised obsolescence

Yet, we must have got something right over the years. The great innovators of the 20th century, the industrial designers, engineers and social reformers, grew out of the flowering of liberal education in the late 19th century, following the introduction of universal and compulsory education in 1872. It was a rigorous education, certainly, but it had time for elegance and beauty, for the creative, the new and the marvellous.

Anyone who has read Harriet Sweatman’s excoriating essay about her experience as a 16-year-old in a Scottish high school (bit.ly/HSessay) will be left in no doubt that things have gone very wrong since those days; children are now being drilled rather than educated, forced down a pipeline of ever-decreasing dimensions with everything prescribed, measured and controlled.

Quite apart from being inhumane, what good is this sort of education in preparing children for jobs that haven’t been invented yet? We are encouraging children to not be too clever. Don’t risk an imaginative answer when a predictable one will get better marks. Don’t strive, don’t think, don’t analyse, just copy, recite and regurgitate your way to success.

Good schools always try to balance this, to broaden experiences, stimulate ideas and deepen understanding. But our secondary school curriculum has precious few places where true, spontaneous, off-the-wall creativity can flourish. Instead, we try to cram in more stuff. Some of it seems intuitively a good idea. Computers run the world, so surely coding is the thing to teach. Well, maybe in the short term, but as Andreas Schleicher - education and skills director at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - recently pointed out, ultimately that, too, will be superseded, just like technical drawing in my day. Skills that now seem key to the distant future are, in fact, unlikely even to unlock the mundane requirements of tomorrow.

While I dispute that we live in an age of especially significant change compared with many that have gone before, there is no doubt that the speed of change is greater and its impact multiplied by the ease of communication. Yet, the educational system moves at a rate that would make a glacier seem swift. Two decades after the inception of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, we are now getting around to reviewing it. Those careers for which we are preparing children will not only have been invented, but also have flourished, declined and become extinct before we feel any change.

Recently, I sat in a Scottish Parliament committee room talking about these very issues. It struck me that although the architecture was more contemporary and the gender balance better, the process we were engaged in was probably the same as when people were discussing the 19th-century reforms. We deliberate (“pontificate” is often the better word), we plan and, where we can, we provide. But our plans are often frustrated by the reality outside the room, and our resources are rarely adequate for the scale of the challenge. So we fall short. There are recriminations. Parts of the educational establishment blame other parts. And the government. And local authorities. Or employers, parents and the media. And teachers, obviously.

How depressing it is to note that one of the only educational debates to have gathered sustained coverage in the UK media recently was about banning mobile phones in schools. Irrespective of the merits of either side of that argument, I see it as another sign of the painful mismatch between our lofty ambitions and knee-jerk reactions. We talk innovation, but practise control. We fetishise technology, but are uncomfortable with young people’s access to it. We condemn misuse, but do too little to promote appropriate use.

Meanwhile, in the real world, everything gets faster and more connected. Should we be comfortable with a society in which our household appliances can communicate with each other electronically while our children can’t? Should we be comfortable when the lead time for a new piece of “fast fashion” is counted in hours, while the lead time on a curriculum that might help children understand the technology and ethics of that industry is counted in years?

Children are educated in a system that owes far more to the deliberations of the last century than a determination to face the imponderable challenges of the next decade or two. And pupils know that. Ban the mobile phone and the irrelevance becomes all the more obvious, especially if there is no money to provide other equally fast and convenient connectivity at school. Harriet Sweatman described herself as having been “flattened by a concrete curriculum” without practical relevance, which provides little help in “finding out who I am and what I care about”.

Much of the impetus behind the school strikes over climate change was the impatience that many young people justifiably felt with a system that is slow to respond to challenges, which they know will affect them in the future, but could only be effectively addressed now.

Speaking of the need for change in American society in 1963, Martin Luther King said: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”

Personally, I think there is only one way we can respond to the “fierce urgency of now” in our schools. Unfortunately, this would require such extraordinary trust to be shown to the teaching profession that no likely government would ever countenance it.

It begins by being honest about assessment. One great puzzle of education is how so little of its philosophy or aspirations are reflected in its assessment, especially in national qualifications. Far from inculcating a love of lifelong learning, they promote a transactional attitude towards education. Young people are asked to perform limited and ultimately meaningless tasks, for which they are rewarded with marks. These are turned into grades, the currency by which pupils buy their way into the next stage of education or, perhaps, a job. As a result, the question “How much can I understand?” can easily be distorted into “How little can I get away with knowing and still get the marks?” Often, little of value from the curriculum is retained after exams are completed.

Sparking inventiveness

Whatever the future holds for them, today’s pupils are unlikely to thrive by knowing as little as possible or by understanding only what has gone before. They will need to create knowledge as an asset, not merely consume it as a commodity. That’s what the Wright brothers and John Logie Baird did, as did all who have ever applied a spark of originality to an existing idea.

We know the skills that will enable young people to flourish in the jobs of the future: the same skills have enabled educated people to succeed since the Enlightenment. It’s boring, but true, that if you have good numeracy skills and are literate (I would argue in at least two languages), there won’t be much that the future can throw at you that you won’t be up for.

Suppose we designed a curriculum that made attainment in numeracy and literacy the non-negotiables, but was non-prescriptive about how that should be achieved - and in particular when it should be assessed. For example, there might be objective national tests taken at an assessment centre when you were ready, or perhaps just when you needed to prove a level of skill to a potential employer or for entry to higher education. And the effectiveness of the system as a whole could be measured by proper cohort research, not by aggregation of incomparable datasets.

The rest of the curriculum, freed from the shackles of assessment, could be given over to teachers to design the most enriching experience for young people. There could still be exams for specific purposes, but the real test of the curriculum would be how well it engaged children and young people, how it liberated their enthusiasms, stretched their minds, trained their habits of learning and nurtured their creativity.

My guess is that such a curriculum would also decrease the toll of mental illness on both pupils and teachers, reduce disaffection and do more to close the attainment gap than any amount of money.

And it wouldn’t require anyone sitting in splendid rooms to redesign it over many years or constantly tinker with the content of qualifications. Instead, we would have a nimble curriculum, based on sound educational research, yet responsive to the jobs market, taking full advantage of developments in pedagogy, be they machine learning, artificial intelligence or whatever else. As in the new “real” world, good ideas would be crowdsourced and the best would go viral. If politicians still felt they needed a role, they could define what society needed from its education system. But it would be teachers and school leaders - with the help of parents, employers, universities and civil society - who designed how those outcomes would be delivered.

Would such a curriculum be rigorous? I believe so. Those basic skills could be tested at world-class levels, safe in the knowledge that schools had the time and flexibility to ensure that all pupils could meet high expectations, rather than having to meet predetermined targets. And surely this would have far greater authentic rigour than today’s ever more reductionist, transactional approach to education - no need to teach children not to be too clever or see them flattened by an irrelevant curriculum.

The truth is that we will never know in detail what will really be needed to prepare children for their unimaginable future. Let’s focus on what we do know and act on that - we might then stand an outside chance of responding to the “fierce urgency of now”.

Melvyn Roffe is principal of George Watson’s College in Edinburgh

This article originally appeared in the 10 May 2019 issue under the headline “‘John Logie Baird didn’t need to do media studies’”