We remain deeply committed to systematizing collaboration in the workplace. Unfortunately, this is not something taught in our schools. We believe we are not adequately preparing our youth to become the weavers of the new social, professional, and economic fabric. We are not preparing them, at the deepest level, for collaboration — or better yet, for empathy in teamwork.
Let us take the example of kindergarten classrooms. The way a kindergarten class is organized has nothing in common with that of a primary or higher-level class. In kindergarten, children sit in a circle. Each child has another to their left and to their right, introduced as pillars, essential values on which they can lean to grow and develop as a cornerstone of a shared social foundation. The circle, by definition, is an infinitely variable space. There are infinite circles around the same center, just as within our children — all different from one another — there are infinite emotions, ideas… and this is where emulation begins!
But as soon as you enter primary school, the classroom becomes a factory. You have one student sitting ahead, another behind — and immediately competition is installed in a space where children are supposed to learn from one another. We condition and format young minds for competition, even forbidding them to help each other during exams.
This is the perfect illustration of the fracture within education that sadly escapes our constructive attention. We will never succeed in cultivating or revealing the wealth of values scattered across the fertile soil of our youth if we brandish competition from the earliest age.
Here lies a wound — a deep wound — that eats away at the mechanics of our educational system. So many young people are trained in division throughout their schooling, only to be asked later, in the workplace, to work in teams. And everyone is surprised to find information hoarding in professional environments. But how can we expect someone who has spent their whole life hiding their test paper, competing for grades, agonizing over poor results — often punished by parents demanding excellence in every subject — to suddenly become a collaborative team player in the corporate world?
Magic will not happen, unless companies dedicate entire budgets to re-teaching their employees how to work together. And even then, personalities have been forged and principles instilled — it’s difficult to undo them. All those recurring team-building seminars and workshops are nothing more than bandages that companies apply to heal, temporarily, a far deeper wound.
So how do we break this vicious cycle? By simply instilling a culture of attribution rather than evaluation. We must redefine the word “evaluation” so that it becomes synonymous with “motivation.” Teachers must learn to lift their students up rather than punish them.
The Finnish education model remains the global benchmark in pedagogy and learning. Why? Because they understood early on that, to foster learning, it must be not only more playful but also more collaborative. The grading system is virtually non-existent, and teachers themselves are experts in teamwork. Equality, individual and collective development, goodwill, trust, and independence are their guiding principles.
Pedagogy is the philosophy of education. Our schools must rediscover the intellectual simplicity and courage to refocus on their true mission — instruction, knowledge sharing, and collaborative learning — rather than perpetuating the punitive, moralizing school model driven by grading and judgment. The very logic of a meritocratic school system, designed for the reproduction of elites rather than preparing the greatest number for life, must give way to a school that democratizes knowledge and gives everyone the means to build their skills.
We have a choice: to prepare our children for work, or to prepare them for life.
We choose life.
By Florent YOUZAN & Hanae BENNANI