What is the future of education and why I am passionate about it.
Have you ever felt like your parents asked you to do something thinking it is in your best interests and you do it only to realize later that you have no interest in doing that thing and it doesn’t excite you anymore?
For me and many kids in India, that was ‘getting good grades’. Since my childhood I outsourced all my decision-making to my parents and diligently followed what they thought was best for me. I was regularly among the top scorers at school and university and achieved many academic awards. I sacrificed every extracurricular activity, every cartoon program on TV, every hangout opportunity with friends; this just to make sure I wouldn’t lose even a single point on my tests. Fast forward twenty-one years later when I first moved to the USA, I realized this: although those good grades helped me get a ticket to a prestigious university in the USA, I had very little knowledge about the world as a whole, about the other skills needed to truly succeed in life. Skills like problem solving, decision making, social skills, people skills, public speaking skills, selling skills, managing my inner peace, heck I had even forgotten how to stay intellectually curious.
I allowed education to get in the way of my learning.
Once I decided that I would explore my real passion, I gradually started moving my focus from getting good grades to learning what excites me and what matters to the world. I started questioning the education system that had brainwashed me into believing that getting good grades was the only way to succeed in life. That gave me the burning desire to learn about different educational approaches in the world, global school systems, meeting revolutionaries in education, and learning new and innovative ideas.
I have understood this: the school system was designed to teach industrial skills. Today in the world of exponential technologies, skills are becoming obsolete every 5 to 6 years. That means by the time you graduate, the skills that you learn may be less relevant. And this creates chronic unemployment. It is not that the school system is broken; in fact, it is doing exactly what it was supposed to do. But our needs today differ from our needs in the past.
Today, we have all the information at our fingertips; literally, our fingertips and our phones. We don’t need to remember when Mahatma Gandhi was born. We don’t need to remember complicated mathematical formulae any more. We don’t need to remember phone numbers anymore. Our brain is constantly outsourcing its tasks. With the simplicity of information retrieval in this day and age, the new education system needs to focus on these questions: ‘How do we connect all this information that is already available to solve world problems and build a better future? How can we learn to learn faster to stay relevant in this rapidly evolving world? How can we remain intellectually curious? How can we manage our inner peace in a chaotic world? How can we stay connected to our true self? How can we teach students to have the right attitude first and then gain skills next and not vice versa?
Billionaire Naveen Jain says this: “Teachers today cannot say ‘I can only take my students to the water, I cannot make them drink.’ Teachers have to ask themselves, ‘How can I make them thirsty?’ And if the teacher succeeds in making the students thirsty, he or she doesn’t have to worry about taking the students to the water and making them drink.”
How do we make them thirsty?
Intellectual curiosity! Show the students “What if X could happen? What if the student could solve a world problem through this? How would the student execute his or her plans?” Questions like these will constantly drive the students to solve complex problems by absorbing and applying knowledge. And this can happen in an education system where the role of the teacher is to ask the questions and not to answer them and the role of the student is to answer the questions and not just ask them.
Eventually with the help of Artificial Intelligence, we will be able to understand each individual child’s learning strengths better which will allow teachers to better facilitate optimized learning environments. Software will be able to design customized curriculum for each student and facilitate faster learning through interactive games. Imagine, instead of the students adapting to the teachers’ style of teaching, what if the teacher adapted to the individual child’s way of learning?
All this can be achieved but we must understand one thing: this so called “fixing the education system” will be a never-ending process as our needs constantly change. However, initiatives such as Mindvalley University that offer education to create Cosmo centric citizens, EdX.org whose mission is to increase global access to quality education and connect learners to the best universities and institutions from around the world, Microsoft EDU which aims to bring the latest Ed-Tech tools to classrooms, Democratic Schools which aims towards giving students more control over their learning path, etc. all targets making education more relevant to the current needs. This is why the future of education looks bright to me.
