Why do we Need to Re-imagine and Re-invent Education?

All around the globe, there’s a growing consensus that our education systems are broken. Our education system created a curriculum comprises of topics with corresponding time allotted to each topic. Because of this, they failed to address the learning curve of a specific student.

It doesn’t matter whether the student learns quickly or slowly as long as the curriculum is being followed. And from my personal experience during my early years in primary school, every time I was not able to cope up, my self confidence goes down; my creativity turns into dust.

All kids have extensive creative capacity. In education, it is as important as literacy, and we dissipate it.

Let me share you a story about a boy in the Nativity play.

The part where the three kings come in to offer their gifts, they went out of order.

And completely unintentionally, the first child came forward and said “I bring you gold”.

The second said “I bring you myrrh”.

Then the third child came forward and said “Frank sent this.”

The point is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong.

And I don’t mean that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.

Sir Ken Robinson, an English author and international advisor on education observed, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.”

According to UNESCO, in the next 30 years, more people worldwide will be graduating from education since the beginning of history. But now kids are going back home to play Candy Crash. Because now you need an MA or MS, whereas before you needed a BA or BS. Soon you’ll need a Ph.D.

It’s a process of academic inflation.

We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

Sir Ken Robinson believes that, “Our only hope for the future is to adopt a new perception of human ecology. One in which we start to reconstitute our perception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds, in the way we strip mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future it won’t service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. The only way we’ll do it, is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are, and our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future, which we may not even see. But they will, and our job is to help prepare them to make something of it.”

Technology & Education

I found this very interesting website founded by Salman Khan, an American educator, which produces video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of academic subjects. It is a teaching tool based on your own learning pace with their adaptive assessment environment. The website is www.khanacademy.org

It is a non profit website funded by Bill & Melinda Gates foundation and Google.

I share this to you because I believe that our classroom should not have a one-size-fits-all type of teaching. There are students who learn faster than the other regardless of age.

With the help of technology, we can accelerate learning for all ages.

Have a blessed weekend!