When I look at schools, I walk into schools, when I interact with schools, I feel like they belong to a different universe. As soon as I set my foot in a school, it feels like I’ve stepped out of the real world and into a something alien and unnatural.

Most people call it an institution, in the same way that we call a hospital or a prison “an institution.”

Institution—this says it all. A public or private place for the care or confinement of inmates, especially mental patients or other disabled or handicapped persons.

Throughout history, it seems like we’ve been dead set on designing educations and education facilities as to make the students feel locked-in, both body as well as soul.

It doesn’t sound very inviting or inspiring, it normally doesn’t look very inviting or inspring, and still we want students of all ages to spend a lot of time in these place, we want them to want to learn, to get inspired, to grow as human beings and to become the next generation when building our society. Yet hardly anything about the ordinary education facilities can be called inspiring, or showcase which direction we want our society to go.

For many years, one of of the questions roaming around in my mind on a daily basis has been, ‘How can we create an good education that builds the sort of minds we want and need in our society, when we don’t even seem to know which sort of society we want?’ Which leads to: How can we go about re-arranging our education over and over and over again, without seemingly taking into account that education and society are undeniably intertwined?

This leads back to what I wrote in the very beginning: How come we have been designing institutions that separates, and in some cases, alienates, rather than intertwines education and education facilities with society? And how can we integrate education in such a way that it becomes a more natural, and less alien, base pillar of the society we want to create?

Is it just me, or is this something that we need to start a serious discussion about that crosses national, social and occupational borders…?