Blog Post #2: What does it mean for a school to be ‘high-quality’?
Hello Interwebbers!
Travelling to different communities where they have different schooling systems, I have understood how, despite the differences, the overall goal for teaching is still the same: To teach the students to become better citizens. However, based on the articles that we have read so far, there are differences between how various people define high-quality education.
Today, we travelled to a school called Colegio Roosevelt. It is an American-based International school in the city of Lima. It is considered the best school in the country and it is the most expensive school in the nation. With rich families to pay the extremely expensive tuition fees, they were able to get the funds for state-of-the-art equipment with new, fancy buildings with creative spaces where intellectual development and innovation grow into amazing projects. Wagner would agree and encourage this type of education system because Roosevelt satisfies Wagner’s ‘Seven Survival Skills’ that students need to learn in order to become better citizens to their society and community when they leave school. During our seminar today, we were able to give examples of how Roosevelt satisfies each of the seven survival skills. For example, the first three survival skills are:
1. Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving
2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence
3. Agility and adaptability
The students are encouraged to use their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that they have been developing over the years to create projects and present them. For instance, Jeff, our tour guide who is the director of education and innovation, told us about a classroom of students who spent two months creating documentaries about topics that they care deeply about concerning Perú, whether it be about pollution, prejudice and racism, or even about the cultures that Perú has to offer to the world.
The second part of the project leads to the second survival skill: Collaboration across networks and leading by influence. These projects were played at school as well as at various events for different organizations around Perú. This means that the documentaries had to be as professional as possible and had to be presented in such a way where a board of executives, and other members of a big organization, will sit and take time to watch the documentary and consider the students’ ideas. The students took two months to lead their investigations and research and took careful planning and constructing of their videos and then collaborated with various organizations to present their final documentaries. They also lead by influence by taking on the initiative of doing everything they needed to do with their 100 percent effort and creativity.
The third survival skill is Agility and adaptability. There is a lot of construction going on at Colegio Roosevelt right now. They are building a new elementary school. In the meantime, however, the elementary students are being taught in small bunker-like buildings in a space within campus called ‘Camp Roosevelt’. We felt that this is a good example of the survival skill because this requires the students to be able to adapt to their environment as it is undergoing a variety of changes. Wagner explains how many schools today are not teaching students the various skills that they need to know in order to survive in tomorrow’s world. Wagner would consider Roosevelt to have a high-quality education in this specific context.
While Wagner discusses his seven survival skills in his article, Kantor and Lowe talk about how it is near to impossible to have the perfect educational system, especially without the education of the liberal arts and liberation. The liberal arts education system originally stems from the Greek educational system called Paidia, where they didn’t just believe in vocational education (learning the content), but also, they believed in the education of the soul. This soul-searching education had the students asking themselves difficult questions about their lives and how they can improve them, for instance. This idealism has become the foundation of the liberal arts education system. We use this system to create various types of people that have a variety of different skills and help them hone in on their craft(s) and/or subject(s) of specialty.
Kantor and Lowe explain how they heavily believe that the school system is so complicated and is so congested with all that students have to learn (vocational education) that they do not get time to reflect on their lives and do some soul-searching to enhance critical thinking and create new and innovative ideas for their learning and for bettering their communities. They believe that learning about the past, about how education became liberated from the clutches of racial discrimination and prejudice, for instance, can help us understand how education should be for our future students. It is not just about the technology and the resources used in the education process. If one does not have the motivation, dedication, and a reason to learn anything, then the rest of the bells and whistles are absolutely useless, no matter how much one can present those tools as useful tools for learning.
Until next time,
Aditi Narayan
