If civilisation is to survive, education requires a total shift in thinking and perspective. Unfortunately I think it is too much for a lot of people to accept,

If civilisation is to survive, education requires a total shift in thinking and perspective. Unfortunately I think it is too much for a lot of people to accept, as our notions of how education should be are too interwoven with our notions of our place in society. We need to stop thinking about academic education and vocational education as separate. We need to stop thinking, 'clever kids to the universities, the rest to apprenticeships if they're lucky.' This is a bad meme. We do not need to 'repair' the distinction between academia and the trades, we do not need to put them on an equal footing, we do not need to stop treating less-academic kids as less important than more academic ones. We need to recognise the distinction for what it is, a myth, a cognitive dissonance, and destroy it. We need everyone to have both aesthetic skills and dextrous skills. We need everyone to be comfortable with interpersonal skills as much as they are with technical, or manual skills. We need that dreaded[1] term, a holistic approach. Most of all we need to stop educating our children in factories using the logic, language and paradigms of industrial manufacturing. We need to educate our children to be happy and adaptive human beings. The employability part will follow from that, we don't need to worry about it directly. [1] Damn you hippies, for ruining our perfectly good words.