What should we be teaching to children?

This is a broad question. Let me lay out 3 disconnected facts that will help showcase the broadness of this question.

1. In a survey of children aged between 8 to 11 (conducted by an Indian Not for Profit), who were taught the fable of tortoise racing the hare, 45% of children failed to recognise either a tortoise or a hare. Is that fable then a suitable content for these children considering that they might not fully grasp what these animals represent?
2. Tech giants, the titans of today’s world are betting inordinate amounts of investment on AI. AI is supposed to take over most of the transactional work done by humans and a significant bit of judgement driven world as well in the next 20 years. Automobiles are going to be self driven, most enterprise processes will embrace RPA, trading would be driven by algorithms, teaching assistants, lawyers and customer service support would be replaced by smart bots, and so on and so forth. Heck, there would even be AI to develop more AI. What then is that we need to teach our children so that they can survive and thrive in that future world where most of our currently employed professional skills would become unemployable?
3. Most curriculums don’t focus on what children can grow up to become when they take up a particular academic stream. The result is that choices on profession are built around neighbourhood role models, learnings from education, availability of jobs etc. Most often than not, choice of profession is done by a simple calculation of risk and reward based on incomplete data. Shouldn’t the education to children focus on showing them what is possible, not just based on what they see for within their immediate surroundings, but truly possible based on where the world is and where it is heading towards? Should the education to children not focus on helping them dream big and be aspirational when they do so?

These questions don’t describe all the nuances related to creating content and curriculum suitable for children. There are more nuances – how do you inculcate a value system in them, how to do make them learn how to learn, how to make them deal with crisis, with utter disappointment, with abject failure, with utter rejection, and also with unexpected and accidental success. These nuances are more than I can think of. These are certainly more than our current set of curriculum has taught of. But thank God, that there are teachers who take care of some of these. Not because the curriculum asks them to, by their own personal accord – good nature, moral compass whatever it is called. But not every teacher does so, and they can’t even do so, for all the children, for all the nuances.

What we should be teaching our children is a question on how we design our curriculum. It is also a question of how our teachers behave – what they do over and above the curriculum.

As I ponder over these questions, I think we need to extend some help to our curriculum and our teachers. While both of them are well intentioned, as of now, they both can do with some help.

What we teach our children can do with some reimagination. I don’t think we have great answers to the question of what we can teach to our children as of today. I think we should start thinking about it.