Another Brick in the Education System
Pink Floyd’s music video “Another Brick in the Wall” is a great demonstration of today’s education system — a “one size fits all” system that subjects every student to the same rigid framework.
Our current education system is designed to allow teachers to teach large amounts of students at once. Due to the large amounts of students, teachers cannot focus on each student individually, and must instead treat the entire class as a single entity. To keep everything organized, each student learns the same thing, receives the same treatment, and takes the same tests.
A major problem with this system is that it doesn’t teach students any important life skills — it merely teaches students to become good test-takers, as all the students are asked to do is to learn and review course material to score well on tests. It also eliminates all individuality from students, and it would be much more difficult for any student who doesn’t operate well under the standard system to learn.
However, Big Data has enabled the creation of a new education system — an education system that allows individual approaches towards each student, one that teaches students to become more than just good test-takers.
Big Data allows data to be collected about the teaching methods and the progress of each student, and the data could be analyzed to see how different aspects of education can be improved. The individuality in the data collected can also help teachers tailor the education to each student’s needs, allowing each student to perform better than had they been exposed to the old system.
A final improvement that the new education system brings is that it would train people to become more creative, rather than have students regurgitate information that was fed to them, and this is important as creativity is extremely important to problem-solving.
