Friday, September 15, 2017

Education

Every child begins their journey through life with an incredible potential: a creative mindset that approaches the world with curiosity, with questions, and with a desire to learn about the world and themselves through play.
However, this mindset is often eroded or even erased by conventional educational practices when young children enter school.

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking is often cited as an example of how children’s divergent thinking diminishes over time. 98% of children in kindergarten are “creative geniuses” – they can think of endless opportunities of how to use a paper clip.
This ability is reduced drastically as children go through the formal schooling system and by age 25, only 3% remain creative geniuses....
The World Economic Forum has just released its Human Capital Report with the subtitle “Preparing People for the Future of Work”.... It goes on to underline how schools tend to focus primarily on developing children’s cognitive skills – or skills within more traditional subjects – rather than fostering skills like problem solving, creativity or collaboration. 
This should be cause for concern when looking at the skill set required in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are the three most important skills a child needs to thrive, according to the Future of Jobs Report....
Complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity are different aspects of the same skill. Karl Popper wrote a book entitled, All Life Is Problem Solving, which sums it up. And it is not just about human capital and job qualifications.

The ability to combine creative and critical thinking are necessary conditions for the multifaceted types of problem solving one will need for life both personally and socially. While creativity is natural for children, ciritical thinking has to be acquired. And after childhood creativity has to be fostered with nurture or the natural impulse may decline and studies show that it does in the case of most people.

This requires emphasizing active learning over passive learning.

This realization is nothing new. John Dewey was famous for his pragmatic educational philosophy decades ago. He also emphasized that education is a necessary condition for a healthy democracy.

Unfortunately, the Human Capital Report is about "preparing people for work" rather than preparing people for life in a comprehensive way. That is a recipe for failure, both for individuals and society owing to its misdirected emphasis on a part of life rather than the whole. Education must be holistic, and therefore it must be systems-based.

World Economic Forum
This is the one skill your child needs for the jobs of the future
Mirjam Schöning, Head of Learning through Play in Early Childhood programme, The Lego Foundation, and Christina Witcomb, Senior Communication Manager, The Lego Foundation

See also
Over the past few years, Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings have all endorsed a teaching method known as "personalized learning."
It involves students guiding their own lessons with the help of technology, while teachers take on more of a coaching role if problems emerge. For its apparent benefits in getting kids up to speed in reading and math, advocates have claimed it could — and should — become the future of US education.
But personalized learning is so new, many teachers still need to learn how it works....
Business Insider
There's a teaching method tech billionaires love — here's how teachers are learning it
Chris Weller

2 comments:

Matt Franko said...

http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/05/investing/lego-job-cuts/index.html

Going the wrong way....

Matt Franko said...

reduced drastically as children go through the formal schooling system and by age 25, only 3% remain creative geniuses...."

Need more art in the curriculum and not optional....