Some answers might be:
That was in a world where an education looked like this:
That was the educational model of my youth (along with a certain amount of physical “remediation” via the cane) and, hey, it worked for me!
I would be happy to oversee it as the basis of today’s education (minus the corporal punishment bit) if it still works for your children and their future.
Will it?
I also know a lot of adults want us to be more traditional in our approach to education – to move back to the basics. Back to the education they knew and “survived”.
The traditional approach insisted that all students be taught the same materials at the same point; students that did not learn quickly enough failed, rather than being allowed to succeed at their natural speeds. The 3 Rs Plus: What schools are Trying to Do and Why, Robert Beck.
Traditional Education Mode
I know a number of politicians have seen back to basics as a vote winner over the years:
Lucy Clark in her book, Beautiful Failures, addressed this issue: “People are reluctant to ‘experiment’ with their kids and so they play it safe. Politicians often think about short-term fixes and what can be achieved while they are in power rather than thinking long-term.”
But…
What if the question was “How do you know if your child is being educated so that they can be successful in the second or third decade of the 21st Century?
According to NESA CEO David de Carvalho, our school and the syllabi they work under must be “designed to equip NSW students with the skills they will require after they leave school, for further study, work and life.”
Geoff Gallop, Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney, believes an educated person in the 21st century will be one who can survive and thrive in a “new” world: “The world in which we live is always changing-climate and the environment, science and technology and politics and economics all see to that. Yesterday’s solutions inevitably become today’s problems or, at the very least, today’s irrelevancies. Educated people have the capacity to adapt and innovate as individuals or organisational leaders. This capacity to adapt and innovate is the practical side of having an inquiring mind.” What is an educated person?
What they are talking about is an education that focuses on:
So, there is a great arm wrestle going on over education, with both sides declaiming the other’s approach.
“Australian workers, their bosses complain, have such poor literacy and numeracy skills many can’t do simple sums, give clear directions, or type on a computer keyboard.”
Versus
Why doesn’t education modernise? “Despite the push for schools to innovate, the whole system remains stuck in the Industrial Age, churning out a steady stream of generic, and at times functional workers, but not always balanced individuals.”
Now, in my opinion:
What if we were “brave” enough to decide what we need to keep, what is still valuable from the traditional style of education, and add to it the skills and approaches that suit our emerging world?
While we are at it let’s make leadership a focus of our education because we are most certainly going to need great leaders.
So, let’s focus using the educational experience to develop the leadership skills that will allow our students to:
Simple!!
Maybe then we will produce the people who will find the “answers” to the next set of world challenges/problems/issues.
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