3. It is much easier to learn when one is involved in activities that they enjoy

 

What I liked most about education in the West is freedom, students being free to choose the subjects they prefer and to leave out the options they do not like. There are very few restrictions, as long as one can earn enough credits through their selected courses.

 

The biggest advantage is that students are motivated to work, since they do what they really want to, as opposed to some systems where students are obligated to take on all the subjects on the curriculum, whether they like those or not. Being forced to learn things that do not interest them, they will probably forget those after the exams anyway.

 

Furthermore, researches show that those who find the answer themselves retain it better than those who are told the answer. What schools should do ideally is to give children the motivation to get involved, to create an environment where children, driven by their curiosity, solve interesting problems, instead of simply memorizing answers to the problems that have already been solved.

 

This may seem unrealistic with regard to some traditional systems but...

 

 

4. It's not because certain things were done in a certain way in the past that we should allow this to continue.

 

The origins of traditional education come from the military to a large extent. They needed identical people, soldiers, administrators, etc. So they produced such a system. When the industrial revolution happened, they wanted identical people too in order to meet certain standards in factories and assembly lines.

So if we look at school that way, we note the fact that we process 30 or even 40 kids at a time, in a batch just like in a factory, while trying to maintain a common evolution for the whole group, often with the effect half of the class finds the classes too difficult while the other half gets bored.

And if you fail an exam, what do you do? We hold you back and we re-process you, it all matches the way a factory works. This methodology was really useful in the traditional context, but we don't have a shortage of factory workers anymore (on the contrary, unemployment rates have increased in some industries).

We take all these children and we force them to try to adapt to this really complex bureaucracy, but actually it is the system that should adapt to them!

When a kid doesn't conform to the system, he is pressured to fit into the system, as if there was something wrong with him. But in reality, the system is here for the kids, not the other way around...

 

Maybe things will change in the near future, maybe not. In any case, nobody says that it will be easy. There will be challenges, but revolutions destroy the perfect to enable the impossible.

 

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Crédit image : StockImages