Anyone who knows me well knows how passionate I am about education. So passionate that one of the moments I feel truly alive is when there is a teachable moment. A chance to exchange knowledge, skills or attitudes. To learn or teach. Doesn’t really matter whether it is me delivering or I am the one receiving it. It does feel good to impact on young or old but impressionable minds.
Sometimes it is a mutual exercise and this can be literally mind blowing and fun. The question therefore is whether the kind of education today evokes those same sentiments among young people. Is it fun or a ritual aimed at memorizing concepts that they reproduce to pass exams? Is it really mind blowing, is it fun. Is it even mutual or it is stuck in the old pedagogy structures where the teacher knows everything and the children are just vessels to be filled with knowledge. A situation that would rattle the bones of the famous Brazilian educationist, Paulo Freire. If you don’t know him, please Google him!
Some years after discovering the works of Paulo Friere, I also picked up some interesting lessons from Sir Ken Robinson who managed to teach us so much about education in a single TED Talk. Ok not just one because once you watch that famous one it leaves you thirsty for more and you end up watching his other speeches and if you are like me, even buying some of the books he authored.
Professor Robinson said many insightful and quotable things in that TED Talk but my take away was that education should be a process that helps young people to discover what they are good at and love doing and then helping them to get better at doing precisely that.
“Education doesn’t need to be reformed – it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions,” he advised.
When you think about it more, you can help but agree with him on this. The future we want as far as education is concerned is to have learning environments that create the conditions for learners to flourish. To discover themselves and their talents and then be guided on how to improve on them.
A future where regardless of what one chooses to do, they are indeed good at it. They have the skills and flair to execute task with ease. Whether they are doctors or plumbers, they should be very skilled at that which they chose. The world has and continues to change so much. Education is no longer that funnel for learners to all try and squeeze out of to a world of options limited to being a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
New careers keep emerging and each of them require one to be really skilled to thrive. Whether you want to be a lawyer or you are just going to create fun content for apps like TikTok, you should really have the skills to do this well enough to attract the money that can pay bills and lead to self-development and contentment.
When I peep into the future, I see huge population of young people. We need to equip them with more skills than certificates. More apprenticeship than exams. We need to do more for them to have a better future. A future that we want.
Allan's Wordy World 