Everyone agrees that education is hugely important. The thing is we are not particularly sure what we want from it. The aim of education should be to prepare us for the challenges of adult life. Yet from this (1) _____, it’s clear that schools fail all but a tiny portion of their students. Whether in highly (2) _____ private schools or in deprived government-run ones, trouble-dealing with life’s challenges remains very wide-spread indeed. Human ingenuity, energy, good will and talent is being lost on an (3) _____ scale. To get more ambitious about education doesn’t necessarily mean spending more money, building more schools, employing more teachers or making exams more difficult. (4) _____, it should mean focusing more on the real purpose of education. There are two fundamental tasks it should help us with, working and sustaining good relationships. In order to (5) _____ these needs, a future national curriculum might specify that the following subjects be studied. Firstly, capitalism. A conspiracy of silence exists around the economic system we live within. We find it hard to change its bad sides or defend its strengths, because we simply don’t fully understand how it works. A subject like maths should be geared to teaching its No.1 (6) _____ for 99% of the population, dealing with money. Such classes will demystify the global economy by teaching students the importance of the (7) _____ of production, and how profits are made. The role of cash flow, HR, leadership, (8) _____ and competition would also be studied. In a perfect school system, you’d also then study a really big second subject, yourself. Young students will be introduced to the idea that we humans are extremely prone to (9) _____ ourselves. They would be taken through the concepts of delusion, defensiveness, projection and denial in everyday life. Individual tutors will be on hand to help students draw personality maps with particularly attention paid to their neurosis and fears. Doing this would ensure that students learn a lot about how (10) _____ they truly are and what types of people they would be best suited to hang out with. A crucial unit would be devoted to career self-knowledge. What job are you best suited to? Students would spend three hours a week (11) _____ what they might do with their futures. Then we would study relationships. Being intensively aware of the social and individual (12) _____ of every unhappy relationship, an ideal education system would emphasize the (13) _____ of skills that help people to live better together. There would be units on kindness and forgiveness, as well as on anxiety reduction techniques. In this educational utopia, it wouldn’t only be children who would go to school but adults as well. Schooling would be for life. Education wouldn’t just be taking place in classrooms. Media and the arts would be made to (14) _____ their teaching potential and help to teach people what they actually need to learn. We so hang up on the challenges of running a massive education system, while failing to (15) _____ the real source of its problems. These are primarily about money, salaries, or discipline. These are really only a (16) _____ of a more fundamental problem. Right now and with no one quite meaning for this to happen, we’ve simply got the wrong curriculum.