Creating A New School Model

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” Steve Jobs

School, as we know it today, was created to serve industries. However, industries have innovated and changed while the school system has stayed stuck. The school system was created to be part of a larger system not a system on its own. However, it seems as the industry innovates and becomes better, the school system gradually became a pariah, separating itself and standing alone.

Pride, I will say is one of the reasons why the school system got left behind. Various groups of people have tried to innovate the school system without much success may be the fact that teachers and principals resist the change. They know the change is needed but then resist it when it comes. More like the story in the book “Who Moved My Cheese”.

Everyone knows there is a need for change, but no one is agreed on what that change should look like. Everyone is afraid that the change may affect negatively them, so they resist the change even when it will clearly meet their needs.

For the past 25 years, I have been thinking and trying to bring change to the educational (high school and University) systems.  I have faced two major resistances:

1. Resistance of Teachers: The resistance comes in the form of teachers knowing what they are doing and picking holes in whatever idea you bring. In some cases, the teachers make the innovation look very common. They made it look like the idea isn’t new and they have tried it many times.

2. System That doesn’t work: When a system is broken, you don’t need to fix it, you have to overhaul it before bringing something new. What we try to do in most cases is to bring innovation to what is already obsolete. There are many great ideas that have been introduced to the school system that would have made it better, but then because the foundation isn’t working, the add-on innovations won’t.

Our book, Truly Human School, was written after a three-month pilot we ran in a high school in Nigeria. We tested every part of it. We worked with teachers for a couple of hours. We invested in the culture. We introduced project-based learning and creating groups for the students to work collaboratively.

Everyone was excited and fully invested in making sure it works. However, when we went back for an assessment four months after, it was like nothing really happened. The school went back to what it was used to preparing students for examinations or standardized tests.

What we discovered was that the best way to bring improvement to the school system is to synthesize the current school system and reverse engineer it back to serve the industry as it is in the 21st Century not as it was in the 18th Century. A school with an 18th Century focus and structure cannot serve the 21st Century industry. It is obsolete. It cannot prepare students for industry.

We decided the best way to change the system is to create a new school model. Trying to change what isn’t working or building on it will not bring the needed change. We followed the advice of R Buckminster Fuller. He said:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

We used design thinking to come up with our new model: we empathized with and observed principals, teachers, parents, industry, students, and government to understand what each needs. Our model is built on the ground common to each one of the stakeholders. We now want to experiment and iterate using a model or prototype.

This is what we plan to do. And that is where we need your help to raise the required funds to build the new school model we call Truly Human School, a school focused on cultivating and unleashing the creative potential and ingenuity of the students and teachers and giving them meaningful experiences and helping them flourish in life. You can be part by donating here:

The cost implications of this obsolesce are that Industry has to spend more to retrain people. The educational system should be a river that feeds industry with its output. Every student coming out of the school system enters the industry. When one part of a system is not functional, another part shift to compensate for that nonfunctional part. This is what Le Chatellieau’s Principle of Reversible Chemical Reactions says. It states that:

If a dynamic equilibrium is distributed by changing the conditions, the position of the equilibrium shifts to counteract the change to reestablish an equilibrium.

This means once there is a change in one part of a system, it will affect every part of the system and the system will then shift to find equilibrium. That is where we are. Businesses should be very much interested in the state of education.

Albert Einstein said, “The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”

The goal of school should just have students pass examinations and get good grades to get good jobs. Companies are getting to a place where they don’t care any longer about grades but competence. It is more about the value you can bring not your grades. To bring value, we must elevate our humanity above tests and grades. Humans create, innovate and add value.