If the world is wrong today, so what happened in education for the last 10, 2- to 40 years that made it wrong? Is it getting increasingly wrong? Will the nest 10, 20, 30 years be even worse than where we already are? What about some of the mini revolutions that were so strongly advocated as the new order thinking, providing a great leadership future for the next generation, holistic education and all.
But what's the hit? And what's the miss?
Why is traditional schooling and exams irrelevant?
Lets be honest. How many of us did not agree that 90% of what we studied in school is no longer used in the working world, except for that rare group of people who actually went back to school and teach the exact same things to kids as a job?
Some of those 10% were expanded upon in college, and depending on what course you major in and what job you end up taking, many more were thrown away.
Simple fact that everybody knows.
So school subjects are useless?
Well, I'm not saying that we shouldn't learn about our bodies and how the heart pumps blood through our blood streams that runs through our bodies or how rain cloud is formed and why there is rainbows.
In fact, I'm all for science and knowledge gathering, if just to understand our world a bit more - which certainly helps for us to function a little better. Takes some of the fairy tales and guessing games away as we grow up, didn't it?
And who can deny the importance of literacy? If we are to gather more knowledge through reading, surely the mastery of its language is of foremost importance.
Well, of course we use math on a day-to-day basis. You count your money, you count your time. You count your people, you count your percentages, your probabilities... and that's probably as much as the average usage of maths on a day-to-day life. And that's math up to... lower secondary school.
So what are we missing out on?
Most of us who went through formal education would emerge through life to find ourselves barely prepared for certain things in life, things that we didn't know we didn't know, until we are face to face with situations which slams on our face, making us begin to question things like:
- Life and death, the spirit and the meaning of our existence
- Relationships and social skills
- Psychology, mental-emotional health
- Happiness and satisfaction in life
- Health care and medicine
- Management and leadership
- How money works, economy and finances
- How to survive in the modern world
- How to survive if you're thrown into the jungle
- How to survive a disaster/accident/outbreak
- Questioning, reasoning, critical thinking
- Curiosity and investigation
- Fun, play and humour
- Sex, marriage, childbirth, child-rearing
- Personality building
- Human rights, criminality and justice
- Love, conscience and compassion
- What we really want
- How to care for wildlife and the environment
- How to care for other people
- Culture, history, human nature and it's implications
A human or a photocopier?
How students are assessed and evaluated determines the outcome of an education. Whatever the desired outcome is, the students and teachers will work towards.
In the traditional sense, parents, teachers and the students themselves want more As. And in most education systems, having more As mean memorising tons of factual information, calculation formulas and rediculously, entire sentences of fact, word for word. Some even go to the extend of memorising entire essays, so that they could score a language subject!
Technically, what the exam system asks of is for a student to be a photocopier! That students spend most of their time memorising and using various techniques to remember whole text books.
Then why do we need a human brain when there is a text book?
The human brain is made to think. It is made to be capable of exceptional cognitive abilities; gathering multitude amounts of data that we don't even realise we are gathering, processing these information into personalised meaning, weighing its pros and cons and delivering its results to you, all in a split second...
Like why you would smile and make friends with this other person, why you would tell them your deepest darkest secrets, why a baby would keep crying until he is delivered to his mother.
Why you just have that gut feeling that this sales man is lying to you, or when you should switch lanes on the road.
Things like how to write a new story, how to create a new device, who to marry, how to solve the current economic crisis, how to save the world...are questions that have no answer in the textbook.
So why all the emphasis on what's on the textbook?
OK, I guess I have spoken enough and I will not prescribe what's best for the next generation/your child here.
But I do invite all of you to stop, think and reconsider, why we study what we study, or why the next generation should continue what we have done.
Feel free to share.
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