Square pegs in round holes: why the education system needs a shake up

Imagine what the world would look like if we all thought the same way… a world without creativity and innovation. A world without debates or breakthroughs. A world without new perspectives or collaborative ideas. Sounds dull to me!

Unfortunately, education systems around the world are designed for uniform minds - Made By Dyslexia’s ‘Square Pegs’ film illustrates this problem in a very magical way.

I am proudly a square peg, and my fellow dyslexics are square pegs too. But the education system is full of round holes. Square pegs don’t fit neatly in round holes, we’re not uniform, and we don’t fit snuggly into the education system. As a result, at school, we’re often told we’re failures.

But as we showed in our DyslexAI film with Made By Dyslexia last year, we have the kind of thinking that could change the world. We need dreamers, problem-solvers, and entrepreneurs to solve the big problems of our time – and schools should be the places that help pave the way for them.

We need to reimagine and reshape the way children are taught and set up for life to fit with what students need, and with what the world needs right now. At the moment, we’re spending years preparing kids for a world that no longer exists. Take AI as an example – most schools aren’t teaching it, but isn’t the goal of school to prepare you for what next? AI is fundamental to this.

School should be a place where children are given the opportunity to find out what they know themselves, instead of just being told what they should know. If this was the case for me and so many of the other dyslexics that I’ve spent time with, school would have been a much happier place for us. If I’d been asked to bring my curiosity to the classroom, I might have never wanted to leave! I was never short of ideas or questions; they just weren’t about anything that was on the blackboard in front of me. Instead, my mind was on the Vietnam war and creating new ideas to solve the problems I saw in the world around me.

Image from Virgin.com

The good thing is that we have a number of organisations driving for this change, and a number of great leaders on board this mission.

Made By Dyslexia has already trained all 100,000 teachers in New York to spot and support dyslexia in classrooms with their free teacher training, as well as a number of other schools around the world, from Abu Dhabi to Australia.

Big Change is an education charity set up by my children, Holly and Sam, to back projects that support young people to thrive in all areas of their life, not just in exams. Big Change has enabled thousands of young people, teachers, parents, and communities to come together through the Big Education Conversation to reimagine education. Over 2,000 conversations have taken place in England, with 35 countries globally taking up the initiative through open-source tools and resources in 7 languages.

Image from Adam Slama

I was humbled to spend time with the Education Minister of the BVI recently at an event with Unite BVI and Made By Dyslexia. Honourable Sharie de Castro expressed her passion for reimagining education and ensuring school is a place that shows children what they can do, not what they can’t. I’m so proud that the BVI is committed to leading the way by using Made By Dyslexia’s free resources to educate the schools and workplaces across the region to empower dyslexic minds – watch this space to see what they can achieve.

Find more purpose stories from across the Virgin Group right here.