Don’t forget what isn’t measured

I’m all for great career advice. I’m not sure I received any at school or university. I didn’t know what the university milk round was so didn’t turn up and my career may have ended up differently if I had. So that was a bit of social capital I missed out on. Just a small lump of social capital compared to the amount many others don’t have and that’s something this country needs to work on for young people today. What I’m not sure it needs to work on is giving future jobs advice to five year olds. I’m with Margaret Heffernan who wrote in the FT “Schools should teach curiosity, not careerism”. Don’t get me started on the education system today, particularly since my sis gave me the book for Christmas “Sedated. How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis” (James Davies). Everyone being programmed (quite literally) to fill an industrial box is a shabby route to continue on for human existence. We’ll soon be measuring kids performance in coding as a matter of priority, as well as English and Maths, and while coding for sure is important, if we only measure and therefore manage that, what are we forgetting and leaving behind? If we did teach curiosity not careerism, we could cross-fertilise all subjects, come up with cool stuff and be a lot happier as human beings in the process.