Charles Leadbeater: "Education innovation in the slums" (2010)

So we are on the verge, 2015, of an amazing achievement:  the schoolification of the world.  Every child up to the age of 15 who wants a place in school will be able to have one in 2015.  It's an amazing thing. But ... actually the school system is recognizably an inheritance from the 19th century, from a Bismarkian model of German schooling that got taken up by English reformers (and often by religious missionaries).  Taken up in the United States as a force of social cohesion... It's recognizably 19th century in its roots. And of course it's a huge achievement. And of course it will bring great things. It will bring skills and learning and reading. But it will also lay waste to imagination.  It will lay waste to appetite.  It will lay waste to social confidence.  It will stratify society as much as it liberates it. And we are bequeathing to the developing world school systems that they will now spend a century trying to reform. That is why we need really radical thinking and why radical thinking is now more possible and more needed than ever in how we learn.

~ Charles Leadbeater (@LeadbeaterCh), Education innovation in the slums (TED Talk (#TED), 2010)