Education

This pandemic has certainly made a lot of people (including me) think about the way that we currently educate our kids. Clearly the divisions between the have's and the have-not's become really stark when the schools are closed and the only choice people have is either rolling their sleeves up and "having a go" or relying on patchy online options. The whole scenario makes me think that we should really start trying to tackle education in much the same way that medicine has been evolving over the last few years. It's about accepting reality and understanding that, much like understanding someone's DNA in order to prescribe the correct medicine, people also have vastly different responses to learning. It's hardly a revolutionary thought, but some people seem to be inherently curious and others less so, some even to the point of being inherently chaotic. 

Some people work hard and push themselves and others spend all their energy avoiding work, it's a realisation that makes the imposition of a single system and a single measurement mechanism seem somewhat "blunt" If we can all agree that maximizing potential is the ultimate goal, then we probably need a more tailored system. Like most large social systems such as health-care, government, social-care etc., the number of variables is large and the number of obvious and economically viable solutions vanishingly small but once this virus stuff is all over I believe our education system is something we should have a serious think about.