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| Screenshot of the drawing made during the video RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms (YouTube) |
My heart shrinks a little bit every day when I drop my kids to school, specially the younger ones. It shrinks because I know that their experience ought to be so much better than it is. While some benefits exist in how education is delivered today, much damage is also being caused, and even worse, the knowledge exists about how to improve things, but teachers and the catholic church control of education in Ireland are incredibly powerful points of resistance to change.
Take my four year old daughter as an example. She started school last September. Within three weeks, she could recognize three letters of the alphabet, but she had already been taught to pray, word by word at least two prayers.
My 13 year old, who is facing some challenges in secondary school recently was offered support. He had to give up one normal class during the week to meet a support teacher. The options given for exclusion were French or Spanish, for which he had a single class a week. When we asked if he could give up one of the several Irish or religion classes instead, the answer was a strong no. We failed to convince the school that the compulsory subjects were far less relevant to his future than the once-a-week ones that they were offering him to drop.
I am unable to understand why schools have the power to determine what is compulsory and what isn't, and parents are left with absolutely no input.
But our biggest problem refers to my 7 year old boy, who has been labelled as having ADD. Like me, he has very little tolerance for noisy environments. In quiet environments he is a caring kid, very analytical, and fond of activities that challenge him. He can spend hours working on design or engineering activities by himself. He loves maths because it was introduced as a challenging game at home, before he started school. While his class is being taught single digit additions, at home he can handle reasonably complex equations and multiplications like 'how many seconds in three and a half minutes?', '14 x 3 - 5?', or 'if a sweet is 15 cents, how many do I get and what is the change from €1'?.
In spite of this willingness to learn, he is under the threat of being seen as a misfit by the school. He just isn't the "typical" student. He doesn't fit well as a receiver of one-size-fits-all education. Sometimes because he is bored, others because he sees no relevance on what is being taught, and sometimes the subject might actually be beyond his maturity.
Until recently every time I asked him "how did school go today" the answer was invariably "why do you ask? You know I hate school", but he conformed and bravely continued going to school every day without complaining. Now he just answer the question with a dismissive "good". I suspect that he is being 'broken' by the system, and that bothers me, a lot.
There are many education experts argumenting that more effective methods of learning use technology to adapt the delivery to individual students' more effective ways of learning. These methods acknowledge that some students are visual, others work better in team environments, others prefer the old style book-based. Unfortunately, mainstream education is failing to appreciate how they are crushing the spirit of children that could otherwise have a brilliant future. Some of these kids have parents that are prepared to compensate to some degree for the failures of the system, but many just learn to believe that they are not smart and eventually drop out along the way.
Education today uses vastly the same methods from the time that public education was created. The core objective then was to produce complying workers for the fast evolving industrial sector.
The problem we face is that these jobs are becoming scarcer, and jobs for life are no longer a prospect for the young. The young will need to be ready to work outside of their comfort zone, they will need to be able to adapt to fast changes in the world around them, they will need to be drivers rather than passengers if they are to succeed as adults.
We need to educate innovators, entrepreneurs, and leaders. Some of these have come through our education system, but I would risk to say that it is in spite of, rather than because of how they were taught. They survived the system.
Somewhere in the past, someone seems to have decided that education must be hard, not fun and strict - not very different from what most jobs actually are. What many people seem to miss is that people actually produce much better when they are in a challenging but fun environment. Fun seems to be associated with 'messing around', when in fact fun in education is about fulfillment, working in an environment where you are happy, where your abilities are respected and valued, where there is a sense of purpose.
There are plenty indicators to suggest that Ireland is likely to be a late adopter in changing education. Our government is still focused in creating employees for the multinationals, rather than in bringing up a generation that will create a stronger Irish domestic economy.
Changes will come, eventually. We will wake up to this missed opportunity to change once the jobs in foreign multinationals dry out. At that stage it will be too late to avoid the damage. There will be even more people looking for jobs, incapable of thinking out of the box and creating their own future.
In the meantime, I will continue to try to help my kids survive this stubbornly outdated system.
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