Profession by Issac Asimov

I’ve just read Profession by Issac Asimov.  The story describes a future world in which everyone is taught to read by a machine at eight and then allocated a profession (and all of the knowledge required for that profession) based on tests at the age of 18. The story describes a world in which education is entirely functional and subservient to the needs of the economy and in which there is no room for personal creativity and individual control over your career. Critical to the world that is imagined in the story is the way in which their education system destroys the individual capacity to learn, replacing it with vast amounts of factual knowledge.

If anyone has the opportunity to send it to Michael Gove it would be well worth him reading it. In the meantime enjoy the critical perspective that good SF can give us on our own world and fear that Asimov’s might have been seeing into our futures.

Read Profession by Issac Asimov