As it’s too hot to do anything practical, I’ve been thinking [arrgh, look out 
]. If education was based on, ‘how to live a fulfilling life’, instead of passing obscure exams, perhaps many of society’s problems might self-resolve over time. It seems to me that many problems are simply cries for help from unhappy people (not only kids) who don’t know how to get from a) to b).
I had, ‘unfortunate’ [ergo, hopeless] parents who taught me nothing, except not to ask questions [ergo, questions resulted in cold silence, black looks or argument!]. By the time I left school, I had no idea:
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how to run a house or bank account, let alone go about finding either
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what ‘career’ meant and how you knew which job you might enjoy and be good at
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the meaning of love/relationship – how you found a suitable life partner; tediously expressed by peers as, ‘the one’ - as if some kind of Messiah!
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how to be successful, i.e. exemplified by the glittering gods / goddesses in the culture pages.
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In the absence of faith, how to be moral and avoid immorality, also to know the difference
Yes, I had a string of O levels and 2 A levels, but what use was the history of world religions, formula for quadratic equations, how to use a Bunsen burner or the gory battles of Attila the Hun? I would rather have learned the difference between capital and interest; how to cook a meal from scratch; how to budget and make a shopping list; how to avoid vexatious or tedious people; and most of all, how to be happy.
What sort of education would you have liked? How would you like to be taught? How would you organise a curriculum based on practical life skills?
