The school as it currently exists is not primarily an educational institution. It is an infrastructure. It provides supervised care for children during the hours when the economy requires their parents to be elsewhere.
It provides a credential that the economy uses as a sorting mechanism. It provides a common experience that societies use to produce a degree of cultural coherence.
These are real functions and they are served with reasonable consistency by the current arrangement. The educational function—the development of each student’s specific capacities to the point where they can engage effectively with the world on their own terms—is also present, variably, alongside the others.
The difficulty is that the infrastructure functions and the educational function are sometimes in tension, and when they are in tension the infrastructure typically wins. The school that needs to process a hundred and twenty children through a standardised curriculum in a way that allows the teachers to manage the groups, the parents to plan their working days, and the institution to produce a reportable outcome at the end of each year is a school that has organised itself around the infrastructure requirements.
The student whose learning does not fit the schedule, the curriculum, or the group format is the student whose educational needs are subordinated to the infrastructure’s operational requirements. This is not malice. It is the logic of a system designed to serve multiple functions simultaneously, in which the functions that are easier to measure and more immediately consequential for more people take organisational precedence.
The curriculum that results from this arrangement is a curriculum designed for the average student’s educational needs as understood at the time the curriculum was constructed, adjusted periodically to reflect changing economic and social priorities, and delivered in ways that the teacher-to-student ratio makes practicable. It is a just-in-case curriculum—a collection of knowledge and skills that someone, at some point, determined that students might need, assembled into a sequence that the institutional requirements of the school year can accommodate and that produces an assessable output at the end.
The just-in-case logic is not without merit. Some things that seem irrelevant at the point of learning become relevant later in ways that are not predictable at the learning moment. The student who studies the structure of an argument in a literature class may use that understanding in a legal context two decades later. The student who learns the underlying logic of mathematical reasoning may apply it to a problem that did not exist when they were in school. The case for a broad base of knowledge rests on the genuine unpredictability of what will be useful and the genuine value of having cognitive tools available that were not acquired in response to immediate need.
The case against the just-in-case curriculum is that the unpredictability cuts in both directions. The student who spends significant time on content that will never be relevant to their life is not accumulating a general capacity. They are spending time that could have been spent on something that would have developed the capacities they actually have in directions they could actually use. The opportunity cost is real. The year that a person who will spend their life working with physical systems, with spatial problems, with the mechanics of how things are built and maintained, spends on abstract linguistic analysis is a year not spent developing the spatial and mechanical reasoning that their specific brain is oriented toward and that their specific life will require.
The curriculum does not know this about the student. The curriculum is designed for the student it was designed for, which is a composite of the students the system has processed historically and the graduate the economy has historically required. The specific student sitting in the room may or may not resemble this composite. The curriculum is applied regardless.
The student who does not resemble the composite is the student most likely to be identified as having a learning difficulty. The student who struggles with the linguistic and abstract-logical tasks that the academic curriculum prioritises is a student whose difficulty is real in the context of the curriculum that has been presented to them. Whether the difficulty would persist in a different educational context—one organised around the development of spatial reasoning, mechanical problem-solving, or the practical application of mathematical principles to real systems—is a question the current system is not structured to ask.
The neurodivergent label, in many cases, describes the mismatch between the student’s cognitive style and the curriculum’s requirements rather than a deficit in the student’s underlying capacity. This is the observation that the neurodivergent framework has made most usefully—that difficulty in school is not equivalent to cognitive incapacity, and that the environment’s design is a variable in the production of educational difficulty. The observation is correct and it is important.
What the observation points toward, if followed far enough, is a redesign of the environment rather than a modification of the student. If the student’s difficulty is produced by the mismatch between their cognitive style and the curriculum’s demands, the response that addresses the difficulty most directly is a curriculum that does not produce the mismatch—one that begins with the student’s cognitive style and builds from there, rather than beginning with the standard curriculum and adjusting the edges to accommodate students who do not fit it.
The master electrician who never flourished in a traditional academic curriculum but can diagnose a complex fault in a building’s electrical system by reasoning through the problem from first principles is demonstrating cognitive capacity of a high order. The reasoning required to trace a fault through a building’s wiring is not simpler than the reasoning required to analyse a literary text. It is differently structured, differently applied, differently rewarded. The system that assessed the electrician at school measured the literary analysis and did not measure the electrical reasoning. The assessment found them wanting. The assessment was not measuring the relevant capacity.
The credential that results from the academic curriculum is a credential that certifies performance on the academic curriculum. It is used by employers and institutions as a proxy for general cognitive capacity because it is available, standardised, and widely understood. The electrician who left school early and has spent years developing genuine expertise in their field has no equivalent credential. The credential system has no mechanism for capturing what they know and can do, because the credential system was designed to certify the output of the academic curriculum rather than the development of capacities the curriculum does not measure.
The France model of personal training accounts is one approach to providing an ongoing mechanism for the certification and development of capacities outside the initial credential. The Singapore SkillsFuture model is another. Both treat the individual as the economic unit, their capacity development as an ongoing project rather than a front-loaded credential, and their access to learning as a right that persists through their working life rather than a childhood entitlement that concludes with the school leaving age.
Neither model solves the deeper problem, which is that the initial schooling still operates on the factory model and the ongoing learning fund is a supplement to a foundation that was not designed for everyone it was supposed to serve. The supplement addresses the gap for adults whose initial education did not develop the capacities they need. It does not address the gap for the student currently in the school whose capacities are not being developed because the curriculum is not designed for them.
The school that competed on results rather than reputation would be a different kind of institution from the one that currently dominates the market, if the results being measured were the right results. The difficulty is specifying the right results. If the results are standardised test scores, the school competes on standardised test scores, which means it optimises for the student who performs well on standardised tests and deprioritises the student who does not. The competition produces a form of selection rather than a form of improvement.
If the results are value added—the development of each student relative to where they started—the school competes on its capacity to develop the students it has, regardless of where those students started. The school that takes a student with a specific cognitive profile and develops it effectively is rewarded for the development rather than for the profile. The school that takes students whose profiles align well with the standard curriculum and develops them along the standard curriculum’s lines is rewarded only to the extent that it develops them beyond what they would have achieved without the school’s specific contribution.
The value-added measure is harder to produce and harder to game than the standardised test score. It requires longitudinal tracking of individual students, the ability to establish meaningful baselines, and the honest attribution of change to the school’s specific contribution rather than to the student’s background or private supplementary learning. It is also, if implemented honestly, a measure that rewards the school for serving the student rather than for selecting the student it is easiest to serve.
The child who cannot sit still in the classroom of 1970 is the child who cannot sit still in the classroom of 2026. The classroom has changed in its technology and its stated values and its awareness of the research on learning. It has not changed in its fundamental architecture—the group, the schedule, the curriculum, the credential, the teacher managing thirty students through a programme designed for the composite. The child who does not fit the composite is still managed around the edges of the programme, still assessed against the standard, still producing the credential that reflects their performance on the curriculum rather than the development of their specific capacities.
The factory is more comfortable than it was.
It is still a factory.
The student is still expected to fit its output specifications.
The student who does not fit them is still the problem to be solved.
Not the factory.
The Vorpel Foundation