10 Reasons Why 21st-Century Education Urgently Needs An Update
№1: Education is not free, but it should be.
Going to school is not granted. Academic degrees are not for everyone. Low-income and vulnerable persons are still excluded. This is unacceptable!
Here are the 9 other reasons why 21st century Education is seriously outdated:
No. 2: The lack of learner autonomy aka “We don’t really get to choose.”
Many graduates say that they feel confused and less passionate about their future careers than they were at the beginning of their studies. Could this lack of enthusiasm be due to the fact that they were never allowed to make choices in the first place?
As a matter of fact, learners are granted little freedom to decide the topics they want to explore, even when and if they are allowed to choose their specialization and field of studies. Not to mention that students are rarely encouraged to set their own pace and priorities.
Self-directed learning (including, but not limited to, the right to set your own learning goals, the right to decide when and what to study, and the opportunity to improve your performance through non-graded self-assessment) is still largely absent in today’s classrooms, even with today’s online learning craze.
No 3: The pressures aka “Why are we stressed if no saber-tooth tiger is chasing us?”
Going to school is extremely demanding- the stress levels are actually comparable to Stone Age’s adrenaline rushes caused by big predators chasing us in the open savannas. Except that this is an unnecessary-for-survival competition.
Sadly, attending classes is not about the joy of expanding your horizons, but about tons of homework and the anxiety of horrendous upcoming exams. And grades. Grades are by far the most important, even more, important than the actual learning goals.
Thus, studying comes to equate to going to war: fighting your classmates and teachers for a better score. Could school exist without grades? Some people believe it is possible.
No. 4: The outdated pedagogy aka “Repeat out loud after me!”
Old habits die hard. Young people are still educated through hundred years-old pedagogical methods, even if the world has changed a lot.
In many countries, education is still massively based on memorization, with students being constrained to absorb the information they will rarely need to remember by heart. Ironically, nowadays, no researcher or teacher relies solely on their brain whenever preparing for a lecture.
Access to information is no longer the issue it used to be centuries ago: we already have the tools capable of telling us where to look for whatever we are searching. Connecting the dots is the real challenge.
No 5: The single choice question aka “You can only have one. Period.”
Another major failure of the current educational system: ill-concealed hostility towards multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.
The sad truth is that our schools amputate multiple talents, mutilating personalities until they fit one-dimensional career definitions.
One example: a talented young person passionate about Arts and Science and gifted for both, will be invariably forced to choose one over the other. In the best scenario, the individual will be allowed to keep the discarded profession as a hobby. As of today, a young person cannot aspire to become both an Artist and a Molecular Biologist. Such hopes are considered foolish and immature and are not even given proper consideration as a serious “life plan”.
University-level students are hardly granted more freedom of choice: pursuing double or multiple specializations is rarely encouraged. “Combos” are few and far between even for more related fields such as Creative Writing&Visual Arts or Chemistry&Biology. Even if times are changing and this type of academic options are increasingly being made available at top universities, the ensuing hybrid career paths are still more of a privilege of the well-to-do.
Given the early conditioning, there is little wonder why so many adults are reluctant to step out of their “got one career, stick to it” comfort zone. The fear of trying new things in new professional fields is instilled by the very educational system, this “brainwashing machine” that trains multi-skilled people to be afraid of exploring their full potential.
No 6: The impressive fossil record aka “We lack voice!”
The world is becoming more complex, but schools cling to the old ways. The status quo prevents students from taking initiative while still young and energetic.
In primary and secondary, children are rarely given the chance to ask questions not strictly related to the day’s topic. The teacher’s job is usually understood as “making sure everyone sticks to the agenda”, all too often at the expense of curiosity and creativity.
“You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making. As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses. . . I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death — if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.”― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Why does modern society constrain its most brilliant minds to wait for almost half of their lives before they can test their ideas? Allowing students to experiment, improve and innovate should be a core part of learning!
Young minds don’t stay young forever. Eventually, many begin to think like their mentors and resort to discarding the “dangerous” new ideas.
Yes, those gate-keeping Glyptodons!
A classic case study: If you are a young researcher and find yourself in a situation where you believe your teacher, adviser, or maybe the whole scientific community got something important terribly wrong, the most sensible advice you’ll get is to choose to remain silent!…at least until your career and reputation are firmly established. By then, obviously, most of the crazy, innovative and out-of-the-box ideas that you might have had will have been safely disposed of, in favor of the predictable and well-trodden paths.
No. 7: The do-it-later attitude aka “Not now &don’t try this at home!”
Educational institutions have lost their original exploratory learning focus. Students are not encouraged to “learn by doing”, but to study first, and then apply it somewhere else, if possible the furthest away from the classroom!
The opportunities to undertake independent research are very scarce in the first school years. Labs and other exploratory resources are seldom used for testing new ideas, being employed, when not locked, mostly for replicating old experiments. Nevertheless, publications such as the Science In School Magazine constantly remind teachers that basic research may be successfully carried out as early as the 5th grade!
Moving on to higher education, the same toxic hierarchy prevents young researchers from making the most of their innovative ideas in their early years. In quite a few academic programs, students are not allowed to start carrying out independent research work until late into their Fourth or Fifth year. But by then, most students will be struggling with the imperatives of building their professional and financial futures…and the greater the number of adult-life worries, the less is one inclined to work on the difficult questions!
In fact, the culture of don’t–ever-contradict-or-correct your mentor prevails even in the apparently democratic learning environments of modern societies. Quite strange for a world that relies more and more on Opened Innovation!
No. 8: Market-friendly brainwashing aka “We become what we are told we should be!”
Enrolling: submitting oneself to a slow and persistent process of indoctrination whose sole beneficiary is the job market, this collective “soul-sucking entity” that trains well-prepared cohorts of professionals to act like co-dependent individuals.
Exaggeration? Not really! The market is very much afraid of independent thinkers as they are known to have a natural inclination for criticizing the system …and starting revolutions.
These dangerous individuals disrespect rules and defy time and money. They are nonconformists willing to work for free or refuse to work at all, visionaries eager to “waste” funds on “absurd” causes such as Art, Volunteering or Basic Scientific Research, idealists dreaming to abolish hierarchies or change the economy altogether, in one word, terrible employees.
But not everyone can become an under-30 entrepreneur! So there is a simpler and more cost-effective solution for “neutralizing” nonconformist personalities at the early stages of their development: Education.
No. 9: The elite mindset aka “The best is reserved for the chosen few!”
Elite universities, elite classrooms, elite dorms, elite careers for elite students. Poor and non-White individuals are almost excluded by default…unless they can prove useful.
While most schools struggle to uniformise students, a few (you already guessed!) elite institutions focus on recruiting and re-conditioning talents in order to serve “higher purposes”, that is, the establishment.
In these upper middle-class circles, unconventional minds are not being silenced, but “hunted” down. Some of the surviving “creative rebels” thus find themselves engaged in top positions in Business, Politics, or Technology…of course, under the sole condition that they renounce to change the system.
No. 10: The combined side effects aka “The laundry list of complaints!”
Fees and access inequality, restricted personal initiative, strict hierarchy, teachers’ inflexibility, a shortage of opportunities for developing creativity. Plus: the stress of competition, the long duration of compulsory studies, the barriers to return to Education once exited, the pressures to fit into the job market.
If it’s true that the whole is more than the sum of parts than it is certain that the failures of Modern Education add up to cause more than one social evil.
To give but one last example — while the world is developing at a faster pace than ever, our appetite for reading and exploring seems to be rapidly decreasing. One could wonder why!
The outdated teacher’s right to reply:
School is a necessary evil. It provides a verified recipe for being successful in life!
The Early 21st Century Academic Approach For Becoming Successful In Life…or Die Trying
The 6 Steps for making it BIG:
1. narrow it down to one professional interest unless you want to be labeled as attention-deficit and un-employable;
2. wait patiently for your turn to speak and never, ever, contradict an older mentor;
3. don’t start practicing until you’re done studying (but accept that school is going to “eat” the best years of your youth) ;
4. don’t forget that you are on your own and you compete against everyone else;
5. always struggle to build a career (a.k.a. a well-paid, well-regarded, life-consuming, not necessarily meaningful full-time job);
6. repeat steps 1–4 until you either become a billionaire, either reach retirement age.
Good luck!
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