M Ziauddin
New schools and new views on teaching are springing up around the world to help prepare the next generation for a rapidly changing employment landscape.
This overhaul of teaching and education methods is much needed – and not only because of the breathtaking pace of change being ushered in by digital technologies, AI and data. It’s also necessary because current models of teaching and education are still firmly rooted in practices that have been around for 200 years or more.
Here are five that are approaching this new era – Education 4.0 – in fresh and exciting ways.
1. Child’s play in China: Anji Play was established in the Zhejiang Province of China in 2002. It follows an early childhood curriculum that fosters learning entirely through child-led play.
Its core belief is that any setting can become a learning environment, with a minimum of 90 minutes every day set aside for outdoor play, using equipment such as ladders, buckets and climbing cubes. Key to the model’s success is that it makes use of low-to no-cost items, ensuring it is accessible to low-income families.
Initially, 14,000 children in Zhejiang were enrolled. It has since been spread to over 100 public schools in more than 34 provinces in China. There are now Anji Play pilots in the US, Europe and Africa, too.
2. Finland’s budding entrepreneurs: Finland routinely ranks high for the quality of its education system, which is regarded as one of the best in the world.
Founded in 1958, South Tapiola High School is one of the best schools in the country. As well as following the Finnish national curriculum, it adds a special focus on teaching collaboration through entrepreneurship, active citizenship and social awareness with real-world applications.
The school’s Young Entrepreneurship Program gives students the opportunity to work in groups to create a business of their own, then enter their ideas in national competitions.
3. Growing green leaders in Indonesia: Shaping the green leaders of the future is central to the Green School, which opened in Bali in 2008. Its 800-strong student body is comprised of 3-to 18-year-olds. The school now has plans to expand into New Zealand, South Africa and Mexico by 2021.
Maintaining a sustainable school environment is one of the school’s main activities, and in the 2017-2018 school year students produced over 150 kilograms of food every month. In 2018, it joined forces with Sunseap, Singapore’s largest clean energy provider, to help the school with its goal of becoming completely off the grid.
4. Refugees in Kenya get connected: In 2015, Belgian teacher, activist and entrepreneur Koen Timmers set up a crowd funding campaign after speaking to an outreach worker in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.
He sent more than 20 laptops (including his own), solar panels and internet equipment to the camp to connect volunteer teachers with refugee children. There are now 350 teachers across six continents offering remotely taught courses in English, mathematics and science to children in the camp.
The Kakuma model is now expanding through a network of Innovation Lab Schools to Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, Morocco, Argentina, South Africa, Brazil and Arctic Canada.
5. Tech immersion in Vietnam: TEKY is the first STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) academy in Vietnam for children ages 6 to 18 years old. Founded in 2017, it has since established 16 centres in five cities across the country.
Through partnerships with 30 schools across Vietnam, the academy is able to deliver 9-to-18-month-long technology courses, as well as a coding camp for the holiday periods.
TEKY teaches modules on programming, robotics, web design, multimedia communications and animation, with students spending about 80% of their learning time interacting with technology.—(How can we prepare students for the Fourth Industrial Revolution? 5 lessons from innovative schools around the world, contributed by Sean Fleming Senior Writer, Formative Content. Published in The Weekly Agenda of World Economic Forum on 03 Feb 2020).
According to UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report, approximately 263 million children and youth are out of school, equivalent to about one-quarter of the population of Europe. The total includes 61 million children of primary school age, 60 million of lower secondary school age, and the first ever estimate of those of upper secondary school age at 142 million.
The UN has also reported that almost 69 million teachers need to be recruited worldwide by 2030 if international pledges on education are to be kept.
A survey among Education International’s 400 member organizations in 172 countries in mid-2019 provided a teaching perspective on the issue; that too few governments have taken the necessary steps to implement Millennium Development Goal 4 and some have implemented policies that are actively undermining it. Among the factors cited by UN organizations are under-investment and increasing privatization in public systems, and poor employment and working conditions for teachers and education support personnel, including precarious contracts, unsafe work environments, high workloads, and low salaries in public sector.
Privatization of education is intensifying and funding for public education is being cut, accelerating inequality by excluding the vulnerable from accessing quality education. The UN report calls on governments directly to ensure a different outcome, to urgently step up investment in free quality education and in the education workforce.
The social cohesion of educated individuals so critical to sustainable development can never be realized if we allow markets to segregate students, to elevate a caste of payers/winners and leave others to deliberately withered education systems, the shadow of lowered expectation and the certainty of lower opportunity.
We know some of the predicted force of technology displacement and, increasingly, artificial intelligence in workplaces and one can envision severe aftershocks in entire industries and dependent communities. Now is not the time to privatize ability to prepare and respond.
To use what we know and what we can clearly see to invest in and renew vibrant public education systems, with fully trained professional teachers; systems that are fundamental to the equitable, just and productive human-centred society we all want.—(The world is failing miserably on access to education. Here’s how to change course, contributed by David Edwards, General Secretary, Education International. Published in Agenda Weekly of World Economic Forum on 20 Jan 2020).
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, retired from the Chinese e-commerce giant in September to focus on education, which he calls the “most important and critical issue” of our time. His concern: the world is changing fast, but education is not.
His formula, however, is not to focus on curriculum or accountability, but on students’ capacity to love.
“If you want to be successful, you should have very high EQ, a way to get on with people,” he said at an OECD conference this month, using the shorthand for emotional intelligence. “If you don’t want to lose quickly, you should have good IQ,” he added. But “if you want to be respected, you should have LQ—the quotient of love,” he concluded. “The brain will be replaced by machines, but machines can never replace your heart.”
If this sounds a bit corny, it fits well with the theme of the day at the conference in Paris, where the OECD released the latest results of its worldwide test of 15-year-olds and discussed how to move education systems from traditional exam factories to places where kids learn content, but also self-knowledge, empathy, teamwork and agency.
In the future, Ma said everything had to be on the table: teachers, classrooms and students. Classes will not be in discreet 40-minute units, teachers will not be the ones with all the knowledge, and educators will emphasize asking the right questions, not just getting the right answers. “If you focus on standardization, everything can be replaced by machines,” he said.—(Jack Ma’s take on education: IQ, EQ, and LQ, contributed by Jenny Anderson, Senior Correspondent, Quartz – Atlantic Media. Published in Agenda Weekly of World Economic Forum on 06, Jan. 2020).
— The writer is veteran journalist and a former editor based in Islamabad.
