“Human culture is essentially unpredictable. It accumulates over the creative activities of individuals feeding off each other. That’s how organic growth happens.” – Sir Ken Robinson.
One of the many stereotypical ways to condemn our present education system is to label it with the tag of being a “factory model” of education. The first industrial revolution broke through the exclusive reachability of imparted knowledge to the affluent and made it available to the common citizen. In order to sustain this initiative economically, the Prussian System of education came into being. Egalitarian in nature, allowing elevation of the middle class and befitting the employment criteria of the 1700s, this module allowed people to be trained to work in factory jobs. Classrooms were constructed by grouping people of similar age and imparting them with the same knowledge and skills over a specified period of time. With the passage of time, leading educators realized the need for standardization of education as it allowed for a common ground to judge candidates on when they applied to universities or for jobs. To cater to that need, in 1892, a panel of ten affluent educators led by the President of Harvard constructed the twelve-year long education system we follow to date. They laid out the entire structure and syllabus, right from pointing out that high school will be different from middle school, to the exact class in which physics should be introduced as an independent subject. This system resulted in the creation of productive workforces where the employer knew what to expect from an employee on hiring him based on degree qualification.
The classroom structure was simple- a fairly aged man with a blackboard in the background, speaking to a group of passive listeners grouped with the commonality of age.
The purpose of education, however, changed with time. Today, education is sought to meet two very important needs- (a) Economic needs which are meant to cater to the need of educating children in order to enable them to take their place in the 21st-century economy.
(b) Cultural needs that are aimed at equipping children with the ability to form their own cultural identities and carry the heritage forward, all while being a part of the globalization circuit.
A research conducted by IBM states that 29% of students drop out of school even before they can finish high school.
The primary reason for this is that the present education system is trying to meet the needs of the future by following methodologies designed for the past. The factory system of education alienates millions of kids who don’t see the purpose of going to school. We’re led to believe that our sole purpose and pathway is of hard work that would allow us to get good grades in order to get accepted to reputed colleges that enable steady jobs. However, the present generation demands a system more liberal than that.
Breaking through the notion of jobs based on university certification, when the internet came into the picture in the mid-late 90s, it changed the dynamics of education. Opposing the classroom scenario of the past, it allowed storage, reachability, and access to information at a very low cost. One teacher could now reach out to millions, yet the student would experience an audio-visual on a personal one-to-one level and take his/her own time to process the delivered information, even go back to it as and when required. This redefined education as now, one didn’t necessarily need to be on the premises of a school for gaining knowledge. In fact, knowledge could be gained anywhere- subway stations, in-transit, cafes, interiors of a home- because mobile and laptops enabled reachability and access with their feature of mobility and internet connectivity. With that, we entered an era where you might be better off having a degree but it doesn’t guarantee you anything, anymore. The employers don’t know what to expect, which is presumably why the entrance exam system came up. Employers now realized that if an individual is driven enough, he can prove to be capable by self-educating himself and turn out to be more efficient than a University graduate. The scope of knowledge is endless and hence, candidates are chosen based on their aptitude for the desired jobs.
It might not be a surprise if the role of homework and classwork switch in the coming years. By gaining access to knowledge in premises outside of school, the system might customize itself to let students learn by self and solve questions in class to prove their understanding of the same. This would shift the role of a teacher to being a facilitator who enables the students to gain knowledge to the best of their capacity by being self-driven. LinkedIn says that it can leverage its own knowledge of how jobs and skills evolve over a period of time to identify various skills that its users require and then offer expert-led courses that allow them to acquire said skills.
The technology of the future will blur lines between physical, digital and biological spheres. This will allow the delivery of education to become an immersive experience. In addition to the current purpose of economic and cultural befitting, the system will have to look at incorporating four mode needs- (c) (d) (e)
The criteria of judgment will be to identify candidates who are solution-driven and capable of divergent thinking. (Companies and their challenge of adaptability to change.)
Ground up approach.
“So it turns out that being an adult is mostly googling how to do stuff”
Future: Ipads in school, merging gaps, experience-based, purpose change, needs, thinking, criteria of judgement.
Add:
Three hundred years ago, the Victorians created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today- it’s called the Beauraucractic Administrative System. In order to have that machine learning, you need lots of people. In order to cater to that, they made another machine called school. These schools made people that were identical to such a large extent that you could ship a person from Russia to Britain and he would be instantly functional.
Good handwriting (handwritten data), able to read and do basic maths. They constructed a system so robust, that it is still there with us today, producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists.
“Schools as we know them are obsolete” Not broken, wonderfully constructed but outdated.
Jobs of the present have computers as clerks and people guiding them to do their job. These people don’t need good handwriting or multiplication skills anymore.
What are the jobs of the future going to look like? We know people will work wherever they want and however they want. How is present day schooling preparing them for the same?
Sugata Mishra conducted an experiment called ‘Hole in the Wall’ through which he proved that in nine months a group of children left with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the west. The inner theory being that children learn best (and can learn anything in depth) when they self-learn by the process of experimentation. He conducted the same experiment with different devices and subjects, only to conclude that in every case, children could self-learn to the point of surprise. Tamil speaking children (7-11 year olds) from a village in South India grasped the concept of biotechnology of DNA replication (30%) in English from a streetside computer in over two months. It was an educational impossibility to watch these children understand something in a language they’re unfamiliar with and a concept that’s a decade ahead of time. Clearly, their potential to intake and integrate information ran far beyond the limitations of textbook knowledge at school.
What does the future of education look like? With technology breaking us away from the need of being barricaded inside the premises of a physical school, we’re in an era where anything that needs to be known is a click away. We’re heading into a future where “Knowing is obsolete”.
Ken Robinson: Children don’t need help with learning, they’re born with a vast appetite for the same.
The process of imparting education has reduced to a delivery system in the last few decades. It results in the force-feeding of information to students who may or may not be interested in it, which hampers growth and dissipates their vast appetite for learning. Science proves that children don’t need help in learning. And I believe that the purpose of a school is to help them do it better than they would if left to their own device. As Sugata Mishra states, “Encouragement seems to be the keyword”.
Neuroscience proves that the reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center, shuts down everything including the pre-frontal cortex which is the part that learns. Punishments and examinations are seen as threats. This system was devised and worked perfectly fine for and during the Age of Empires because that era required people who could perform and manage themselves through stressful scenarios. But the Age of Empires is gone.
The balance needs to shift back from a threat to pleasure.
The role of a teacher needs to move from the one handling information deliverance to the that of a facilitator.