The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a [schooling] system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.

Source: "Build a School in the Cloud." TED2013. Feb. 2013. Conference Presentation. Additional Information: This quote by educational researcher Sugata Mitra means that our current educational system was designed by the British over 100 years ago; while the system was very effective in meeting the needs of that era, this system is still in place, despite the fact that our educational needs have changed. In particular, the Victorian education system was designed to produce people who would fit well in what Mitra calls the "bureaucratic administrative machine." These people needed to have certain skills and needed to be identical to one another so that they were interchangeable. The quote is from Mitra's 2013 TED Talk about experiments in education innovation. Watch the full TED Talk here: Sugata Mitra - Build a School in the Cloud  

“Build a School in the Cloud.” TED2013. Feb. 2013. Conference Presentation.