17/06/2026
What if we’re teaching the wrong things?
I’d like to talk about 8-year-old Viktor here: he’s the son of friends of mine, he featured in one of my books, and he’s one of very few people I know whose dinosaur knowledge is better than mine. And he’s given me some thoughts about our education system.
Viktor’s cocktail of neurotypes is quite wide-ranging. He’s autistic, he’s dyslexic, he’s recently been diagnosed with dyscalculia, also has dysgraphia, and (by total coincidence) this week he had his ADHD assessment, passing with flying colours. He also struggles with sensory overwhelm and frequent meltdowns.
Big surprise, Viktor didn’t last long in mainstream education. He’s now home-educated with a tutor for his English and maths - both topics he struggles with enormously.
I love this lad like a godson. And it hurts that while he’s at home trying to access education as well as he can, our whole curriculum is set up to define him by his weaknesses. To portray him as some kind of academic car crash, while professionals blame his neurodivergence for his inability to meet standards he wasn’t born to play along with (and who are just licking their lips at the prospect of blaming his parents too).
When Viktor and I last went to the park, he was riding his bike. The park is quite hilly, and he was feeling adventurous.
I stood and watched this 8-year-old boy, with neurodivergent diagnoses coming out of his ears and enduring all the stigma of not being able to attend school, demonstrating *amazing* maturity.
He assessed the risk of each hill before riding down it. He took all the precautions and needed no reminding to wear his helmet. After each ride down the hill, he reflected on it. If he got things slightly wrong, he recognised it and learned from it.
The one time he crashed the bike into a pole, I watched as he handled himself better than most 8-year-olds I’ve ever met, talked through his tears about what caused it, had the resilience to steady himself mentally while he recovered physically, and then made a reasoned decision about when/whether he wanted to get on his bike again.
Which made me wonder… why aren’t we teaching personal qualities like that as part of the curriculum?
Why isn’t bravery part of the curriculum? Or patience? The ability to assess risk, or take risks? Curiosity? Why are so many things just left for kids to work out in their free time?
(When I was a teacher, one of my biggest objections was that I could take a child who was terrified of numbers and help them address their fears, or take a kid with no motivation and help them to love learning, but the “quality” of my teaching was based on how much they “progressed” through the curriculum rather than whether they were becoming more well-equipped to do so.)
The world has plenty of adults who leave university with a finance degree and struggle to load a dishwasher.
Or people who can navigate the curriculum really easily but have no curiosity in life.
Or people who can memorise everything for an exam but forget to wear a helmet.
Meanwhile, Viktor can’t spell “apatosaurus” but he can talk to you for hours about them. And he can’t do subtraction, but he knows how sharply to brake and when to do so.
He’s the kind of kid who will never get assessed by the kind of curriculum he deserves, and needs reinforcement from the people around him to help him realise just how amazing his qualities are.
And I hope that, twenty years from now, he’ll be glad that he developed the valuable personal qualities he did, despite being a kid who “struggled academically” because of curricular bias. It’s better that way round than being a kid who was favoured by the 2020s education system but never learned life skills that weren’t on a test paper.
Why not focus the curriculum on the development of human qualities rather than just raw knowledge? We’ll get better adults that way. Like Viktor will be one day.
Chris Bonnello - Autistic Author
