Education’s New Paradigm
Education is the key to improving peoples’ quality of life.
Formal education has done wonders for lifting millions of people out of poverty.
It is a well-known fact that the more educated a person is the higher their income.
Formal education has got to change to match the needs of the future. The current model of industrial teaching is more like a factory process than a wonderful, fun and exciting preparation for a life of freedom, passion, and fulfillment.
Most of the world’s best education systems do a fantastic job of preparing people for careers and jobs working for the government or corporations. But what about entrepreneurship, artistic, creative, and lifestyle pursuits? Many of the jobs and careers of yesterday are no longer relevant and we have millions of well-educated and highly skilled people who are soon to be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence.
Shouldn’t we be teaching people generalized, big picture, flexible skills as well as specializations? This would enable people to master specialties as well as adapt to changes as and when they occur.
The pace of change is accelerating, not slowing down.
Take a moment and think about how much time, energy and resources are wasted by educating people for jobs that no longer exist?
Then there is the matter of life, leadership and finance skills that are simply not taught. We teach people specialties that are way too narrow and assume that families will fill in the gaps. The alternative is to expand the curriculum to be more holistic – educating the whole person and including subjects such as:
- Personal Leadership
- Personal Finance (money, wealth, making, spending, investing, legacy)
- Relationships (family, friends, colleagues, life partner)
- Health & Wellness (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual)
- Spirituality (non-religious)
- Entrepreneurship
- Vision, purpose, passion, and ideal life design
- Life skills (communication, creativity, resilience, etc)
Including these items into the formal curriculum would empower people to own their lives at a level never seen before and would enable them to reach the pinnacle of life’ to be fully realized, self-actualized human beings who add value, lead and inspire others.
In addition to what we educate in terms of curriculum, there is how we educate. Lectures are boring. Classrooms are boring. Many of the teachers themselves, while good and well-meaning people are also boring. Consider smartphones, apps, social media, music videos and video games. These are dynamic, fun, entertaining and engaging. The classroom of tomorrow should look more like a music studio, live concert with multimedia than plain chairs with a white or chalk board with the teacher teaching. Teachers should be leaders, guides, facilitators and public speakers, not test oriented, compliance demanding authority figures who punish and rarely reward.
We learn more from experience than from being told.
Since we learn more from experience than we do from lecture, what if subjects were taught via interactive games that encourage cooperation, teamwork, and relationship building. Dynamic facilitation could draw out lessons from students actual experience. Multimedia would engage and reinforce the lessons which would include mental, physical as well as emotional learning. Learning this way would ensure retention of the lesson as well as an ability to apply it.
Imagine the possibility if everyone were to be educated like this?
The amount of time it takes to effect change to our systems of education, as well as our curriculum is way too slow for today’s reality of instant communication, instant gratification, and short attention spans.
We have got to get better at transforming education to keep up and make it relevant for today and tomorrow’s reality.