Is education built for 19th Century relevant in the 21st Century?

In England education was mainly the preserve of religious institutions with the odd elite school that is until the nineteenth century. By the 1880s education was compulsory for children aged 5 to 10. Methods mainly used were rote delivered in classrooms divided into rows. These rows were often classified into streams from A-D. I’ve heard it said that the rows were purposely so as to represent the rows of the cotton mills in the towns and so the schools were preparing pupils to work in the factories. 

What relevance does this type of teaching have in the 21st Century? A good degree is no guarantee of a profession. Is the education system broken? Does it develop young people with the skills required in an ever changing, fluid environment where jobs last as long as the unavailable technology cannot replace those skills.

Are we going back to the future? Learning by doing or as it really is reflecting on the doing the remedy. Certainly it’s more enjoyable – who never enjoyed understanding how something worked whether that was mechanical or biological. 

The general concept of learning through experience is ancient. Around 350 BCE,  Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics “for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them”. 

Was Aristotle aware of Confucius who said, “I Hear and I Forget, I See and I Remember, I Do and I Understand” … enunciated by Chinese philosopher and reformer (551 BC to 479 BC)? Or his improved quote, “By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”

Here is Experiential Learning & Reflection explained.