Course content. Module 1

What if there weren't any more schools? Compulsory schooling is the standard in almost every culture on Earth. In the EU, most countries require children to go to school from 5 to at least 16 years of age. What would happen, though, if primary and secondary schools, high schools, technical institutes and universities were all gone?

The benefit of the human brain is its innate capacity to learn from other experiences, making it possible for people to learn faster and learn more by transferring skills from one person to another. This helps you develop your skills quicker and frees up time to learn other skills. Education institutions develop their curricula so that you can learn quicker, better and more effectively. This is especially important given the rapid development of (digital) technology.

Without school education, people would need to rely solely on apprenticeship and job shadowing. This would be detrimental for your personal and professional growth for two reasons: lack of opportunities to learn, because you would actually need to get into a trainee job to start learning that job and much slower learning because you would need to experience each task, skills, etc.

These results at the individual level will be replicated on a larger scale in our culture. Without schools, our society will not be able to meet the intellectual demands of existing and emerging technologies. Instead, we would be forced to abandon most of our inventions and return to a more primitive and simple age, with no intellectual demands on the individual.

Although formal schooling would vanish, it is possible that we would instead see the return of the Middle Ages and later apprenticeships for most of the professions with young children entering the workforce in order to acquire the lifelong skills required for their careers: vehicles, planes, rockets, and other devices needing years and years of engineering and technical training would be a thing of the past. 

But with the loss of schools, there would also be a disappearance of choice and personal independence, as individuals would be forced to choose and train only within the work immediately available to them. So, note that the mobile phone in your hand, the satellite to which it communicates, and the rocket that carried the satellite into space all exist because of the schools. 

Watch the video What if all the schools disappeared:

https://www.youtube.com/watchv=_OE2rNP8fb0