Support new ideas in education
Why you will profit by helping alternative initiatives.
If you work in business or government you should start helping and support educational innovations to grow and succeed now. Our world is heading towards changes where to old educational approach has no answers and trains students for jobs that will be gone in a few years. Helping to fund unfunded schools, with your knowledge, effort, skills and money is essential for our shared future. Help schools like Knowmads. Knowmads is a private experiment in alternative business education. There are many like us around the world fighting without money to be the different, more real, education the world needs. Helping us is in your own, even financial, (long term) interest and here’s why:
Intro
Knowmads exists almost without outside funding now for seven years. It’s students discover ways to shine with their unique talent in the world. Almost all of them find or create work. And if they struggle, they find the gold within. Can normal schools deliver that? Can you imagine what could happen if we could expand with the same funding normal schools get? How we could offer education to those that have all the talents, but not the funding? Here’s four reasons why our approach to education deserves the more support from companies and government.
1. Embrace Diversity and stop rating against preconceived norms.
I once heard a female manager say this: “I have a guy working for me, I don’t know what he actually does. But when I put him in a team, that team will work way better.” That is smart embracing of diversity. Can you imagine schools rating kids like this? They should!
Diversity is a necessity for our complex society. Stop comparing children with tests that only mark very few talents (math, writing, being able to sort a lot of information) and help them grow in what talents they do have (being nice, creative, sporty, inventiveness, caring for elderly, taking risks, exploring relationships, tactical gaming and a million more). Many children, and employee’s, are forced to comply to rigid terms. The consequence is that spirit, talent and therefore valuable contribution is wasted. It is way smarter, better and cheaper to be curious how ‘special’ students can be an answer for special needs of our society. More people excelling at what they do, helps them and society bring more value. It also reduces costs of burn out, and prevents misery like meaninglessness, alcoholism, violence and depression.
Help any every child, and employee, to discover the context and frame where it shines. Any experienced HR manager knows this the key. Help the schools that live that insight to grow.
2. Invite Self Discovery and Odd Learning Routes.
I had a horrible bad primary school test (CITO) score, which did not represent my capabilities at all. At that time I had read half the library and started with the adult one already, liking history and science fiction most. What I learned from these books helped me later to invent management games. This strange combination in reading helped me to see patterns and essences of human behavior and understand this in a given context better than most managers. School had not done anything to boost or support such learning. Crazy?
Schools should not kill creativity*, but enhance it. They should boost (self)discovery. Why? If we teach people to fit in a box, we (as business or society) can never grow beyond our box. On a global scale, our current (company)box cannot beat the upcoming economies, nor solve societal tensions or environmental and economical collapse . We must raise people beyond our own box. That takes courage, wisdom and vision. All three aspects that made all big enterprises, well eh, big.
Even better, apparently companies that have creative leaders make 13% more money than those that those that don’tª.
*) watch the famous TEd talk of Sir Ken Robinson: “why schools kill creativity”
ª) IPAR research by Greg Stevens and James Burley “Piloting the Rocket of Radical Innovation”.
3. Stimulate students to become Fully Human Beings.
Why? Lack of essential human skills costs business and society billions. Consultancy & training costs are often made by re-educating employees to become people with social skills. Stuff they apparently never learned at school. Many managers lack self reflection and a quarter of all employees quit because of their bosses bad behavior. In ICT alone millions are lost due to lack of social skills, bad communication & stressed out management and because the developers, clients and sales don’t understand each other well enough. Several plane crashes (probably more) came about because a (co-)pilot didn’t dare to break routine. These factors bring many businesses down, make workers sick and get a lot of people working on the wrong assignments or coming up with wrong solutions.
Thus we should stimulate children to become people with a critical mind, awakened body and spirit. That is much more than some socializing children to behave in class or get targets in work. It means raising awareness, self reflection, physical intuition and more. Such people do create much longer lasting value, than tomorrow’s profits. Make your company one, that supports this sentiment as it will help you to outlast most others.
4. Stimulate Cooperation over competition.
In the end, we are all in it together, and must face the biggest challenges of our world together if we want to overcome them. Neurologists, complexity scientists all agree on this: the strongest strategy of life is cooperation. The cells and the bacteria in our body don’t compete. We exists only because of very complex cooperation. The smartest people have the most neurological connections in their brain, not a few best ones. The only natural growth that sees the rest of the body as competition is cancer. Nature is a system with wheels that all integrate into each others existence.
Also people that cooperate better win. That’s why most real democracies are richer than more hierarchical dominant run states. That’s why cooperation inside a company is more important than the competition outside to make a difference.
So should we keep on wasting money for wasted educations or try something smarter: let children cooperate more, help them invent together and try out new things outside of the books. This is how they can help us designing a better, more healthy and rich world, in both value and diversity.
(scientific background: prof. dr. Gerard Hüther (german, youtube can translate)
Written by Floris Koot in 2015. Placed under Creative Commons.
*) www.knowmads.nl is one of the schools I helped design and found. At Knowmads students organize our marketing and crowd funding, they run the kitchen and help the school in ways no other school dares to even hope for. And yes, still we need support in means and services. Support in any other way for this kind of educational innovation is welcome in many other places as well.
More ideas and arguments can be found here: http://www.pinterest.com/wayofthefool/change-education/ and in the booklet “Changing the Face of Education” on the Knowmads website you’ll find some info on how we work with these principles and more in education.
