IS MODERN
EDUCATION SYSTEM IS OUTDATED?
We study the same way as 150 years ago
A standardized educational system appeared in the XIX century. It does not mean there was no education before that. There was knowledge passed down to the generations, usually of practical use. So when due to the changes in the society during the Industrial Revolution public schools emerged, they were an important and necessary element in social development. In 2020 we need to admit that the curriculum and how schools are organized have been the same for more than a hundred years. Although there has been constant reforming of the system, there was not any restructuration of the teaching process. The entire educational model is obsolete. It is based on information transmission models.
The school is designed to educate children as they were a primitive version of a computer search engine that only can provide information in response to a question. What happens when the same question is asked in a different way? The found answer is not valid anymore and a student does not have a correct one.
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1
Know≠Remember
Knowledge or memorization?
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Despite the global trend of shifting from memorizing information to developing skills and competencies, school still equals knowledge and memorization, understanding it as a student’s ability to answer questions from school curriculum​.
The education process based on the memorization of knowledge nowadays is becoming more irrelevant as computers have a much better memory and speed to process information than people. Artificial Intelligence exceeds us in the task times and times. What remains of the human beings is the combinatorial capacity and ability to generate new ideas based on the big variety of data and experience.
Knowledge is a concept more complex than memory. It is skills and competencies . Deep knowledge emerges from deep, systematic work. Digging in one place. Trying, making mistakes, debating, understanding reasons, understanding what has been learned and educating others is all work that leads to the knowledge.
2
Teaching or guiding
Explanation or guidelines?
When the year course program can be found on the Internet within a span of minutes, spending hours and hours in the classroom listening to the teacher looks like a loss of time. Nowadays teachers cease to be the only source of information. Their role is changing. They should guide and supervise but the source of knowledge should be students themself.
1999 Sugata Mitra, who had PhD in Solid State Physics, installed a computer in one of the walls of the office in the Kalkaji district, which is one of the impoverished neighbourhoods of New Delhi. A computer was installed in the wall for free use and the testers installed webcams for security. The computer became popular with children who had no special knowledge of computer science. Children learned to use computers and the Internet themselves at the initial level as users without help, guidance or any previous knowledge. Mitra called this educational method Minimally invasive education.
The experiment Hole in The Wall allowed S. Mitra to come up with a hypothesis: basic skills in computer science by group of children can be obtained through random learning initiated by teachers who only should provide accessible hardware and software and motivated content. It does not require teaching and instruction from the adults can be minimal. The level of English of the children who did not speak English previos the experiment after was sufficient for the use of e-mail, chat and search engines. They improved their mathematics and their performance in general and answer exam questions a few years earlier. All that only by making accessible few computers and the Internet access.
The idea that children are able not only to find a solution but also formulate the task themself is the foundation of the online Synthesis School.
One session of Constellation at Synthesis, recorded by https://synthesis.is
Minimally Invasive Education method gained its popularity in special education. Ana Urgoiti, the founder of Bilbao art school for the people with mental disabilities notes that the role of a teacher in their school is mostly consists in providing motivated conditions and supervising during the sessions. The students have to find their way in art themself. Otherwise they will not be learning but repeating.
3
Mistakes≠failure
The excitement of the new discovery boosts children's willingness to learn. Children are developing at a fantastic rate. By an age of four they are usually able to speak their mother tongue perfectly (or several with the multilingual parents), to read and understand the design of the world around. All the information they gathered by experimenting and questioning because of a natural curiosity. In the school questions are asked by the teacher. Responding to questions becomes a student's duty. In school a child is discouraged from asking questions, their curiosity is neglected, their answers are graded. It does not help with child's motivation to learn. And the idea of right answers is wrong in its core.
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In real life problems often do not have simple black and white solutions. Sometimes we find one through trying and mistakes. Sometimes there is no right solution at all. Sometimes finding a solution is less important than the path we choose to it. There are grey areas in both ethical and problem solving sense. School should teach how to deal with complex and multidimensional problems. In Elon Musk's AstraNova School dilemmas /Conundrums/ are used instead of problems. Children learn to reason and justify their opinion in the situations where both sides can be right.
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Critical thinking and argumentation are relevant in any area. Best way to teach them is to put students in the most plausible situation where they have to make difficult or tough decisions. Sometimes they would make bad decisions and learn from that. That knowledge in no case is a worse knowledge. But in school a bad decision often means a lower grade.
The standardized grading system supposes easier evaluation for the teacher. But in reality this simple system does not take into the account complex situations and personal characteristics. Which results in the same low grade for the student who did not reach the needed answer despite their efforts and the student who did not start the task at all.
Grading by the wrong and right promotes fear of making a mistake and, as a consequence, the lack of participation and creativity.
4
Life is not a sum of subjects, it is a mix of them
Knowledge is a concept more complex than memory. It is skills and competencies . Abstract tasks divided into subjects by the school curriculum are useless, children don’t understand why they need to and don’t remember. Their brains weed out the excess information.
According to Phenomenon Based Learning method students study complex entities each of them includes various subjects, in their real context. Phenomena are holistic topics like European Union, media and technology, WWII or film production. Those topics can be combined together to create even bigger projects.
Children are given real tasks: to make a film that takes place in a certain period of history, to organize the opening of a small enterprise, such as a confectionery or repair shop, to grow a pumpkin crop on a school garden. They are not learning some abstract concept. They research the topic they need to realise in practice. In this case even abstract information would have practical application.
What science is needed to grow pumpkins? Botany or Biology? Possibly Chemistry. Also Geography and Climatology. The idea is not to give more information, but to give a task and means to find information. Quite possibly students will never need to grow a pumpkin in their whole life. But they would definitely need the ability to research, to plan and to put knowledge into practice. Also the project is always team work. This is one of the most important differences with subject based education. Although students do group work in traditional school, the evaluation is individual. In real life team working is often more important than individual qualifications.
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One of the education project by Astra Nova School consists in exibition organization. Imagine you’re a student, you’re assigned to a team, you have 500 pieces of modern art from a variety of artists. You also have map of the world where there are about 15 cities like Madrid, San Paulo, Los Angeles. Your task is to find out which of these works will be most interesting for the cities you plan to visit with your exhibition. So, what do the students do? They compete at auctions, they get into debts, they prepare exhibitions with which they will travel the world - both for the maximum possible profit and to attract as many visitors as possible. They also play the role of curator, deciding what the exposition will look like in each city.
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In 2006 Sir Ken Robinson PhD (A New York Times bestselling author and international advisor on education), at his TED talk Do Schools Kill Creativity explained that the most controversial trait of school is educating children out of creativity: “We stigmatize mistakes in school, mistakes are the worst thing you can make. We are educating our kids out of their creativity”. The school as we know it now was created in the XIX Century for the needs of society during and after the Industrial Revolution. There were needs for fast and universal education when the population was largely illiterate. Creativity was not the priority. Public education was intended to teach people whose work would be doing the same simple operation in the factory or in the office. Nowaday the machines do those jobs. Society has changed as well. Moreover it is changeing constantly. We can not expect the education system to immediately catch up with the present but we should expect it to reflect some of the changes. Even if the present is changing and the future is unknown, the best school can do is educate children to adapt rapidly to the constant changes and unpredictability, in other words to be creative.