The prime challenge of our education

The world is progressing faster than ever and no one has a clear view of what and how it will be in another decade of time. Amid of uncertainties, only thing certain is that the future will be conquered by the ones who creatively adapt to this evolution.

This leads to the question; Does our education system evolve at a sufficient speed to prepare our young minds? To answer this question, let’s start by facing the disturbing truth of education which most of us are already aware. The modern education system as we know, is actually centuries old. It has its origins in the age of industrial revolution. The purpose of this system is to mold students into the job specifications of the industrial age. To make the matters worse, countries like Sri Lanka add its colonial past on to the already disturbed education model. In a colonial system, creativity is suppressed and compliance is hyped to prevent any revolutionary thinking that could challenge the colonialism.

On to the bright side, every child has extraordinary ability of being imaginative and creative. I wonder sometimes if we are educating them out of creativity in the name of giving knowledge. today our education system is mostly about ‘being right’ or ‘memorizing things’. If you do not let them to take a chance, and be prepared to be wrong, children will never attempt anything original or unheard. Attempting something original and unheard is the basis of creativity.

One way is to keep them warm with creativity is to engage on a broad variety of activities to ignite imaginations. Let them experience different domains and explore possibilities of cross applicability of the learnings. This is why IgniterSpace do not run courses on just programming or electronics, but carryout programs involving variety of learnings. We get our children to interact with multiple learnings such as empathizing, mechanics, observations, electronics, robotics, prototyping, programming, art, etc. We believe this is an effective way to build creative minds who can face the unknown future to solve problems. As Pablo Picasso once told, ‘All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up’.