What Is Lacking In Education

One of the major challenges we face in creating a better world is giving young people an education that is more relevant to their lives. We are all now aware that education must encompass actual experiences rather than simply mechanical memorising of disjointed facts. It ought to assist kids to develop their natural talents and interests as well as practical life skills.

Therefore, we must consider why global education systems appear to be failing so outrageously in nurturing all of these aptitudes.

They are aware that they are failing. This explains why new curricula are released every few years, why teacher in-service training is becoming increasingly important, and why there is occasionally a hurried frenzy around the creation of teacher materials as new syllabi are released.

The fact that educational authorities continually attempt to examine the “facts” offered by standardised examinations is another proof of their acknowledgement of their own failure.

And the way they react to the negative results they receive typically goes like this –

1. Revise and simplify the syllabus

2. Give fundamental topics like maths, science, and languages more and more time.

3. Sprinkle phrases like “Twenty-First Century Learning” on top.

4. Train Teachers.

5. Increased monitoring and analysis of internal and external assessment outcomes

6. Increase the level of accountability for schools’ performance

7. Recognize that these results are not getting better.

8. Repeat!

It is difficult to create an effective educational system that achieves higher-order objectives like promoting positive attitudes and a sense of morality and optimism. In fact, even if traditional educational institutions are successful in imparting reading, writing, and maths abilities, it is entirely likely that they will steer pupils away from such objectives. Furthermore, non-cognitive skills are frequently overlooked despite the fact that they significantly enhance and complement the contribution of the more conventional cognitive skills. Openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are some of the most famous non-cognitive abilities. These abilities can be modified using a variety of techniques and interventions and have a great capacity to predict longer-term results in life.

Interventions in education have generally been directed towards enhancing schools, whose effectiveness is judged by the test scores that their pupils achieve. This constrained perspective ignores the significance of non-cognitive abilities and how they can be improved over time, assuming that achievement test results are an accurate reflection of life skills.

I firmly believe that placing children at the centre of everything we accomplish will be the only way to improve education and, ultimately, the state of the world. Not from big data, the curriculum, parents, books, or teachers. Students. For far too long, the students in our classrooms have been the victims of education rather than the leaders of it.

Those tiny letters on a school report have grown to mean everything to parents, kids, teachers, the media, and the general public. And when they are worse than is expected (and they generally are), pressure is placed on education authorities to reform our broken system. We then return to the beginning. According to Alwin Toffler “The Illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn. Which is very true as the education system now only relies on the test scores on sheets, not more or less than that. In order to create self-assured, spirited world-changers, how can we, in a sense, put our students back in the centre of the classroom?

A few things that are need to be prioritised are –

1. Rather than having pupils use a pre-existing model to solve problems, give them children’s problems that are open-ended and demand that they develop their own formulas.

2. Teach them to treasure learning.

3. Let them fail, but meaningful. Their failures will be their incentives to do more and more to achieve things.

4. Prepare themselves to face their fears, they shouldn’t fear not having a job someday or remain in dilemma watching their mates achieving what they want.

5. Make them realise that they are the beings that can create wonders and have the brightest future.

A student’s mindset should be clear cut and they should believe that knowledge will pay off if their scores didn’t. Life is much more than these test scores, their goals should reflect the enthusiasm they have for anything they are passionate about.