Changing Mindsets

Teachers often complain that some children in class are just not interested in learning. They are not willing to put in the effort needed to learn. 

Yet any of us who have taken care of a three year old know how physically and mentally tiring it can be to answer their incessant stream of questions and follow them as they go exploring the 
environment. 

Every waking moment in a toddler's life is spent on learning. 

So are we as teachers saying that some children don't want to learn while actually implying that they do not want to learn in school?

Why should they - schools are contrived environments while the world outside is so much more rich, diverse, nuanced, dynamic and challenging. 

Our schools and education system still equate education with acquiring information. 
Knowledge is absolute, so a good student is someone who can download the knowledge, save it in memory and reproduce it as is, whenever needed. Learning is therefore all about obeying orders and following instructions. Moreover schools continue to function under the illusion that knowledge is available only in the class. 

The world however is changing rapidly. While it took the radio over three decades to reach 50 million people, Facebook reached this number in just a couple of years. 

Our children's world is one of instant information, communication, entertainment and collaboration. YouTube has over one billion page views per day and there are over 31 billion searches on Google every month. 

We as teachers need to accept that knowledge can no longer be considered as absolute and unchanging. Neither can we continue to believe in ourselves as the fount of knowledge. 

Instead, we need to view ourselves as facilitators - creating collaborative, inquiry-based learning experiences that will help students to gather, examine, validate, modify and extend knowledge. We need to support and guide them as they use the current knowledge to create new products and solutions as well as discover what is still unknown. 

While this will have implications in the school design, classroom setting, practices and curriculum, the change will have to begin from the change in teachers' attitudes towards teaching and learning.

Series - Education for Future & Schools of Tomorrow

The pace of change and technological advancement in the world has been exponential in the last century or so.

The light bulb was invented in 1879. Since then, we have seen the invention of cars, the telephone, air travel, radio and television.

For today's common man it is hard to imagine how life would have been just a hundred years ago. Unimaginable inventions like submarines, spacecraft and even the atomic bomb have taken place.

Computers, micro-processors and most famously the Internet have come to occupy a place in our everyday lives.

Cloning, 3D Television, holographic images - the world around us is changing at a relentless pace.

That brings us to the question of what changes should we bring in education to keep up to the huge changes happening in our world today?

Think about this - children who are starting Kindergarten today will retire by 2065 or even later. We can only imagine what their world will be like during that time. If we are unable to predict, let alone visualise the future, how can we provide education to our children that prepares them for the future?

As parents and educators we often marvel and envy at the ease with which children learn to use and adapt to technology. They seem to pick up and learn to use the latest phones and gaming devices almost instinctively, while we adults struggle to figure out the mechanics of how they work.

This is a simple example of how we need to test our paradigm of education, reinvent our understanding of teaching and learning and make it relevant for today and also for the future that is nebulous and uncertain.

Beginning with this, we will publish some thoughts we have on this - what changes we can bring and how to the system of education that is rapidly getting out-of-date.