If I could redesign what we teach in school, I’d put far more emphasis on teaching people how to think, how to learn, how to understand themselves, and how to navigate the world.
This is what I’d call a Polymath’s Curriculum: an education designed not just to transfer knowledge, but to develop people who can think across disciplines, recognize patterns, fill their own knowledge gaps, and adapt.
Learning how to learn.
Understanding how you personally acquire and retain knowledge best. Learning different methods of knowledge acquisition, memory and retrieval, and how to adapt your approach depending on what you are trying to learn.Logic and reasoning.
How to construct and evaluate an argument, recognize faulty reasoning and cognitive biases, distinguish correlation from causation, evaluate evidence, and change your mind when the evidence warrants it.Synthesis.
Learning to combine ideas, evidence, and perspectives from multiple disciplines. Not simply accumulating knowledge, but connecting it, reorganizing it, and using knowledge from one area to illuminate another.Pattern recognition and predictive thinking.
Learning to identify recurring patterns across history, human behaviour, economics, politics, science, nature, and culture. History should not simply be about memorizing dates and events. What conditions produced an event? What preceded it? Where have we seen something similar before? What happened next? Patterns can help us form better hypotheses about possible futures while still understanding the limitations of prediction.
Gap recognition and backfilling knowledge.
Learning to recognize what you don’t know, determine which missing information actually matters, and efficiently acquire it. You don’t always need to become an expert in an entire field. Sometimes you need to identify the critical gap, learn that piece well, and integrate it with what you already know.Intellectual versatility.
Learning how to move between disciplines, perspectives, tools, and ways of thinking. Different problems require different mental models. Becoming comfortable entering unfamiliar territory rather than immediately thinking, “That isn’t my subject.”Scientific literacy.
Not simply memorizing scientific conclusions, but learning how to dissect research. How was the study conducted? How large and representative was the sample? What were the controls? What are the limitations? Who funded it? Has it been replicated? Who evaluated it? What does peer review actually establish, and what doesn’t it establish? Science should be understood as a method of inquiry rather than a collection of unquestionable conclusions.Philosophy and epistemology.
How do we know what we think we know? What constitutes evidence? What is truth? What assumptions are underneath our conclusions? How certain should we actually be about what we believe?Systems thinking.
Understanding relationships, feedback loops, incentives, second and third order effects, unintended consequences, and how changing one part of a system can affect seemingly unrelated parts.Inner awareness.
Understanding your own patterns, motivations, strengths, weaknesses, values, biases, triggers, and ways of thinking. Metacognition should be something kids learn early.Outer awareness.
Learning to observe people, environments, systems, social dynamics, incentives, context, and subtle changes. Actually noticing what is happening rather than only seeing what you expect to see.Emotional intelligence and emotional regulation.
nderstanding emotions in yourself and others, empathy, communication, conflict, boundaries and relationships, but also learning how to tolerate discomfort, manage stress, and respond rather than simply react.Multidisciplinary project learning.
Give students real problems that require them to draw from mathematics, science, history, writing, technology, design, economics, psychology, art, and communication. The real world doesn’t divide problems into 50 minute subject blocks.Information literacy.
How to research, evaluate sources, distinguish expertise from authority, recognize manipulation and propaganda, compare competing claims, and navigate a world where information is abundant but reliable knowledge is much harder to identify.Communication.
Writing clearly, speaking publicly, listening well, asking good questions, interviewing people, explaining complex ideas simply, and learning how to disagree productively.Creativity and curiosity.
Idea generation, experimentation, tinkering, questioning assumptions and pursuing curiosity across disciplines. Curiosity outside the curriculum shouldn’t be treated as a distraction from learning. It often is learning.Financial and economic literacy.|
Taxes, debt, compound interest, investing, insurance, contracts, entrepreneurship, opportunity cost, risk, and understanding how economic incentives influence behaviour.Body literacy and health.
Posture, movement, sleep, nutrition, eating pace and chewing, fasting, reading food labels, basic physiology, and understanding how seemingly insignificant daily habits compound over decades.
Ultimately, I think education should spend much less time asking, “What information can you remember?” and much more time developing people who know how to learn, think, question, observe, connect, synthesize, create, communicate and adapt.
You don’t have to know everything. You need to know how to recognize what’s missing, how to learn it, and how to connect it to what you already know.
Those skills compound for life.
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What did I miss?
What else should schools be teaching that they aren’t?
If schools were like this I’d be substantially more likely to have kids.