Thursday, May 2, 2013

The education system

          Over the years , there has been an increasing consensus that the education system needs to be changed . Creativity(process of coming up with an original ideas that have value).and curiosity are the traits that I believe most employers would look for. Change is happening at an unprecedented scale. The number of discoveries and new infomation found doubles every 18 months . That is why it is important to be creative,since the real-world problem is ambiguous , the context always change.The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways . For futher details on this , you can watch Sir Ken Robinson's talk on TED , on revolutionising the education system and how school kills creativity.

           In his book , Out Of Our Minds, he explained how our education system is based on industrial revolution, where basically students are taught to suffice the needs of the industrial revolution.  It is a human construct and certain responses in certain places and time; which is obsolete in our age. There is also a hierarchy of disciplines , in which science is prioritised. I'm not saying that science is not important , I'm saying that science and art are equally important; they are not mutually exclusive , they overlap one another , they complement one another. On top of that,most students don't get to explore the full range of their ability and interest. Without being too wordy, I'll just paste a picture here to illustrate my point



"Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." - Albert Einstein



However , I think that there is no point to blame the politicians or whoever invented our current industrial-revolution based education model, it was suited at those time anyway , and it is certainly egalitarian which is a good thing. Sometimes it's not just about finding the right answers , sometimes it's about asking the right question. I think the question that most of us should us is that "What can we do about this? " " What can we do about our education system within our circle of influence?" instead of " Why didn't the politician or the authority do something about the education system." 






This question brings forward to a story that I want to tell you. First of all I'm an A-level student, who is currently doing first year college in Malaysia,  I don't even have a job and I certainly don't have much influence in the society. But still , there are 
things that I can do, and I'm still working on it, which is promoting the flipped learning method .I believe(as it is empirically evident) that it works within the constraints of the education system, and will produce students who are 
curious , lifelong self-learners and most importantly , creative ,for human communities depend on diversity of talents,not singular conception of ability.I will post my story in promoting the flipped learning in my next entry.




2 comments:

  1. spotted a typo:
    "Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a [FISH] by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." - Albert Einstein

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  2. thanks for notifying me qi xiang , i appreciate that

    ReplyDelete