Reimagining Education: Time to Build Better Humans

The beauty of human potential.

Imagine discovering that the very system meant to shape our children has been quietly damaging them for decades, suppressing creativity, undermining confidence, elevating one narrow definition of intelligence and discarding everything else. That’s what we’ve been doing. We created an education model that positions those with academic capabilities above the child who is gifted with their hands, their imagination, their intuition, their movement, and their empathy. And then we wonder why so many adults still carry a sense of inadequacy that began in childhood.

The truth hits you when you listen to people talk about school. The hurt still lives within them. During coaching sessions, I often hear from clients how they were made to feel stupid. Others felt overlooked or misunderstood. Many internalised the belief that they weren’t “good enough.”

School was supposed to open doors; instead, for countless people, it closed them before they ever realised what they were capable of. Educational reform must start with an understanding of the debilitating impact the existing, outdated system has had on so many.

The Role of Parents and Carers in Education

We built a system obsessed with memorising content but uninterested in teaching children how to live. Most young people leave school able to recite formulas but unable to budget their wages, express their emotions, understand how the governance of a country works, understand how to run a household, navigate conflict, recognise burnout, or build healthy relationships.

And schools still assume parents will fill these gaps, but how can they? Many parents were never taught these skills themselves. They are doing their best in a world moving and changing at a pace no previous generation has had to endure. Families are overstretched, emotionally overloaded, and juggling pressures that didn’t exist thirty years ago. Expecting them to teach what they never learned is unrealistic.

So many adults carry deep wounds inflicted through their journey in education. Many carry a persistent fear of failure. A reluctance to try. A sense that they are “not academic,” because one rigid system told them so. These wounds settle deep. You see them in boardrooms, relationships, parenting, friendships, and mental health decades later.

The tragedy is that many of the world's brilliant innovators were the same children who struggled in traditional classrooms. Elon Musk spoke openly about struggling socially and academically. Richard Branson's dyslexia forced him to think differently. Jamie Oliver, Jo Malone and Deborah Meaden, all dyslexic - built extraordinary careers through creativity, intuition and practical intelligence, not rote learning. Their brilliance wasn’t a flaw. It is the 'one-size-fits-all' education system that is flawed.

The Reality Young People Now Face

Today’s children are growing up in a world more complex than anything previous generations ever navigated. Many live in blended families with shifting roles and emotional landscapes. Community life has weakened. Digital life dominates. Social media amplifies comparison, anxiety and exposure. Identity is processed earlier - cultural, gendered, personal. And in some communities, young people face the pressure of drugs, gangs and a desperate search for belonging in the wrong places.

We have changed as a society, yet our education system has barely moved. A curriculum designed for the 1970s is trying to serve children born into the digital storm of the 2020s. For thousands of people, it hasn't worked.

The Relationship Crisis Nobody Prepared Them For

We teach children maths, grammar and geography, but not how to have a difficult conversation, how to set boundaries, how to repair after conflict, or how to build and maintain relationships. Yet relationships determine everything: career success, mental health, wellbeing, family life, belonging, identity.

A few years ago, while consulting for a philanthropic organisation, I worked with a young woman who had achieved first-class honours in her degree. She was bright, articulate, capable - and absolutely terrified of picking up the phone to speak to donor clients. She was happy to send emails or even texts but the idea of speaking to someone made her really anxious. She had learned to perform academically, not relationally. This isn’t rare. It's systemic.

Digital Life, Pornography and the Andrew Tate Effect

We can no longer pretend children live in an analogue world. Their socialisation happens online, often before they have the emotional maturity to process it.

They learn about sex from pornography. They learn about masculinity from influencers like Andrew Tate. They learn about identity from algorithms designed to exploit insecurities. They learn self-worth through likes and followers.

If we don’t teach porn literacy, digital boundaries, critical thinking and emotional regulation, the online world will teach them instead, and it is teaching them the worst lessons imaginable.

Estonia has already embraced this reality by integrating digital ethics and AI literacy into its national curriculum. They don’t ban technology; they teach children how to own it rather than be owned by it.

Understanding the World They Grow Up In

Many adults vote based on fear or headlines because they were never taught how their country actually works, how budgets are allocated, how public money is spent, why governments borrow, what inflation means, or how policies affect everyday life.

Civic and financial literacy are essential to a functioning society, but we treat them like optional extras. Imagine the difference if every young person understood:

• how government works

• where the national budget goes and what it is used for

• how taxes work

• why political messaging is crafted the way it is

• the difference between evidence and emotion

• Why voting is important

• that media is often working to a financial and political agenda
  

We could transform democracy simply by educating the people who will inherit it.

Behaviour Isn’t Fixed by Punishment - It’s Fixed by Regulation

Detentions don’t work. They never have. A dysregulated child cannot behave better simply because they’ve been told off. Children need:

quiet transitions, breathwork, mindfulness, space to settle, movement, teachers trained in nervous system regulation. Japan’s morning rituals show how powerful this can be. Start the day calmly, and everything shifts. This isn’t soft. It’s biology. Children are not designed to sit still for hours. Their bodies were built for movement, exploration, physical expression and curiosity. Scandinavian countries understand this. Outdoor learning. Movement breaks. Craft subjects like Sloyd. Learning through doing, not just listening. Energy is not the enemy. It is the gateway to learning.

The Environments We Educate In Are Still Based on Prison Design

This is one of the most overlooked truths in education: our school buildings look and function like institutions of control. Long corridors. Locked doors. Fluorescent lights. Windowless rooms. Rows of desks. Concrete yards.

These spaces don’t inspire learning. They suppress it. Finland, New Zealand and the Netherlands are already redesigning schools around natural light, comfort, flexible spaces, collaborative hubs, quiet zones, outdoor classrooms, soft materials, and open, humane architecture. Architecture teaches children as surely as teachers do. If the building feels oppressive, behaviour becomes defensive. If the building feels safe, children open. The environment must become part of the pedagogy. Eco-Schools worldwide have demonstrated that nature is the most effective mental health intervention available, and it’s free. Children who spend time outdoors behave differently, learn differently, and feel differently. They are calmer. More present. More imaginative. More resilient. Nature reconnects them to something deeper than the noise of the digital world.

A child who is grounded in nature is harder to shake emotionally.

Teachers: The Most Undervalued Professionals in the Country

None of this is possible without teachers. And yet the disparity in value is extraordinary.

A Premier League footballer earns £250,000–£290,000 per month.

A UK teacher earns £3,800–£4,250 per month. Teaching should be positioned within society as one of the most important roles of all and respected as such. Instead, teachers face administrative overload, behavioural crises, large class sizes, constant scrutiny, limited resources, and emotional exhaustion. They give everything but receive little structural support. The way that we, as a society, value our teachers provides a real insight into our values and priorities.

By contrast, Finland treats teachers as professionals of the highest order, highly trained, respected, and trusted. And it shows. Most of us will have encountered a teacher who really understood and inspired their pupils.

I remember one of my primary school teachers, Hannah Cotter, whose kindness and curiosity opened the world to me. I still carry her influence today.

Teachers help to build people. We must support them to build the most fulfilled humans possible.

When Learning Becomes Real, Children Come Alive

This is the hopeful part, the part we forget when we reduce education to grades and deadlines. Learning can transform a child’s entire sense of themselves, but only when it becomes real, tangible, and connected to life. Children come alive when they finally see the point of what they’re learning.

They light up when they realise why maths matters, when it links to their first wage, their first budget, their first sense of financial independence. They pay attention to science when it explains their own body, their health, the food they eat, the environment they live in. They become better friends, partners and colleagues when communication is taught not as grammar, but as courage, clarity, empathy and emotional honesty. They develop resilience not through clichés or punishment, but by understanding their emotions, their triggers, and how to regulate themselves. They discover community when they experience it, not as a paragraph in a textbook, but as something they co-create, contribute to and belong to.

These are the lessons that shape adulthood. These are the memories that last. These are the moments where education finally does what it was always meant to do: expand a child’s sense of who they are and what they can become.

And countries that are serious about educational reform are already building this into their curriculum design. Finland prioritises wellbeing, creativity, deep thinking and teacher autonomy rather than endless testing. Singapore and parts of Canada have integrated project-based learning where students learn through real-world problems, gaining teamwork, communication and resilience as core competencies. New Zealand’s modern learning environments encourage collaboration, reflection and student agency instead of passive listening. Estonia embeds digital literacy, AI understanding and online safety directly into everyday learning. Expeditionary Learning schools across the US and Europe connect students to their communities through fieldwork, inquiry and lived experience. These countries are proving that education can be human-centred, relevant and genuinely life-shaping, if we choose to make it so.

What Education Could Become

Reforming education is not an attack on what came before; it is an acceptance that the world has changed beyond recognition. Our young people are growing up in a society that is faster, louder, more complex and more emotionally demanding than any generation before them. They don’t need an education system built for a world that no longer exists, they need one that understands what it means to be human today.

We don’t need a system that produces perfect exam-takers. We need a system that produces grounded, resilient, emotionally intelligent young adults who can think clearly in uncertainty, feel deeply without being overwhelmed, communicate honestly, understand their own minds, and navigate a world that demands flexibility, empathy and courage.

That is what building better humans truly means, not polishing children into identical academic products, but helping them grow into strong, self-aware, capable human beings.

And here’s the most hopeful truth of all: it is entirely possible. Not theoretical. Not abstract. Completely achievable, but only if we allow education to evolve into what it was always meant to be: a place where every young person is not just taught, but genuinely seen. A place where they feel valued, understood, supported and empowered to become who they truly are.