Plane and simple education

Now that I’m more or less done with defence for a while, I’m turning my eye to education for a new policy on the Manifesto Project site. I'm still reading around the topic on a provisional basis. It's a lot harder than defence because I don't have a base level of interest in it. There's a lot of philosophical conflict for which there is no definitive answer.

Burnham's plan, announced today, to introduce more of a vocational slant is not without merit but there are compelling arguments for and against. The devil is in the detail. You don't even find firm agreement among teachers. It strikes me, then, that it makes sense to give schools the freedom to establish their own philosophies so long as they are maintaining a basic standard of literacy and numeracy - and let parents have a choice.

As it happen, thinking along those lines brought a memory rushing back. Not so long back, I was in New York and on the next street over from where I was staying there was a school with an A4 Skyhawk, a WWII Texan and a business jet in the playground. Turns out it was an aviation themed High School. I always thought themed schools would be a great idea, with the curriculum based around a particular technology or discipline.

With aviation there is massive scope for teaching maths, engineering, materials science, physics, history and geography, along with meteorology and navigation - hooking into development of drones, avionics and space tech. We would do well to make school more interesting. I didn't tune out of school because I wasn't academically inclined. I tapped out because I was bored to death. I would have loved this. Perhaps even giving kids the chance to restore an aeroplane.

I never got anything like that from my school. With Sea Cadets, though, I did a course with Dewsbury college where we took an engine out of an old car, stripped it, cleaned it and rebuilt it. Mechanical engineering wasn't for me, but it gave me a base literacy in the subject, exposure to an actual trade, and experience of a proper workshop. The modern learning environment is far too sanitised and sealed off from the real world. It strikes me that we need to reintegrate education with the rest of society. We need to think much bigger than Burnham's witless tinkering.

I would even go as far as making a technical vocational pillar in the curriculum compulsory for all. Technical illiteracy is a massive problem in politics and journalism. This is how you end up with windmills instead of power stations. You only need to look at politics to see how badly the education system is failing in terms of instilling a desire to learn.