As a teacher are you future-ready? Are children in your class being groomed to be future-ready?
We are living in the pressure tense! But the mass of educational institutions are encaged in dark-age thinking. Why? Because, other than the advent of television, computers, and diverse electronica, the process of learning has not changed in multiple millennia. Teenagers as screenagers are engaging and interacting, but unaware of processes that constitute smart learning. They need immediate help. The standard prescription for learning? Sweat, swot, slog! A formula for disaster. No innovation! None of our systems are designed to inspire self-efficacy.
In a world of high stakes competitive intelligence, the student who does not know how to learn is destined to be left behind: A member of ‘The Misfortune 7 Billion’! Not relevant to the future, relegated to the past. Dark-age slaves chained to a system long past its sell-by date!
Children of the third millennium need champions — teachers and parents who need to unlearn, and relearn. Systems need to transition from order to disorder to new order. Why? Because our prevailing learning methodologies are obsolete!
What’s a better way? Here are some eminently feasible suggestions:
• Learning how to read at super speed and deep depth. Readers make leaders!
• Comprehending what is being heard or read, intensively and extensively, on the run.
• Capturing masses of information on single sheets of paper based on the way the brain likes to learn, via diverse visual mapping techniques. ‘Visual maps’ reduce complexity, accelerate learning, extract clarity from clutter, convert extensive information into intensive insights, recognise design beneath disorder, and are ideal for high-speed note-taking and notemaking via interaction with oral and printed information.
• Boosting your student’s memory using a range of mnemonic techniques designed to absorb panoramic arrays of information, and recall facts and figures relevant to multiple contexts.
• Cut through vast swathes of syllabus material and slash the learning curve.
• Unleash creativity so that students learn to be resourceful in all areas of activity, moving from ideas to execution. School students emerging with business ideas!
• Learn and apply insights that lead to goal-setting and goal-getting: moving from stress to strength to success.
None of the above smart strategies are in the syllabuses of any school. Who are the primary victims? Children!
So what are you going to do about it? Bargain your way to a better deal? How? Education can never be as expensive as ignorance. How much can you save by not creating a new generation of brilliant children growing up into role models who can move our planet from hope to fulfillment?
I strongly propose that every teacher, student, parent and senior citizen, in all sectors of life become immediate stakeholders in a learning revolution. It is the only hope for the nation to move ahead. Or else stay dead!
Choose: Are you killing yourselves or skilling yourselves?
Choose: Education, or Extinction!
Commonsense versus Nonsense
“It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that’s all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better” — John Ruskin (1819-1900).
Strategies of champion students
• They are vision-oriented, and impelled to act as goal-setters and goal-getters, imbued with deep-set images of achievement.
• They are enthusiastic and passionate about what they do in school, as well as after school: they have fallen in love with learning.
• They learn and apply super-smart strategies in their school work.
• They never waste a mistake! The learning acquired from making a mistake is always greater than the cost of the mistake. Result: they profit from every mistake.
• They have consistent support and encouragement from parents and teachers.
Does your school exhibit the above competencies? Are you open to possibilities? Can you afford not to do anything about it?
(Dilip Mukerjea is a Singapore-based strategic learning specialist)