What you really learned at school

• Tweet
• Pin It

School are churning out the unemployable.

That’s the provocative title of Ewan MacIntosh’s marvellous blog post about how schools are failing our children, our businesses and hence our entire society.

He quotes (we’re getting a bit nested here), Don Ledingham’s summary of Alan McCluskey from the Swiss Agency for ICT in education:

Why am I writing about this in a blog about the business of games?

Because we are going through a period of massive change in the games industry and, to quote screenwriter William Goldman:

“Nobody knows anything”

We are all experimenting, playing, creating, exploring and, above all, learning. We are going through a process of learning via doing, of experimenting and failing, of trying and iterating.

If we can’t do that – because we don’t know how to learn – we are going to get left behind. As Ewan fears our children may be getting left behind.

On the one hand, it’s mad of me to bring this up. I put myself forward as an expert (i.e. the author of How to Publish a Game), who teaches at specific times and places in disconnected little pieces (i.e. masterclasses) and I make consulting money because my knowledge is scarce.

So why would I tell you that you don’t need an expert teacher to learn?

The answer is because I believe strongly that what I do is not tell people what to do; I teach people how to learn about social games, or self-publishing or digital distribution. I talk about what is going on and why. I don’t have a playbook that clients should follow slavishly. I have a set of frameworks that you can apply to any game, any business, to understand how to make the game more popular, and make more money.

In short, I don’t teach people answers. I teach them how to learn.

Which is why I am so dispirited to learn that schools have stopped doing that.