Education is the Key to a Better Future, But…

Becoming a better writer is a never-ending process of self- learning and discovery.

This is my conclusion after reaching 100 Medium posts.

I started to write a piece per week more than a year ago. The reason I do it is simple: I love the opportunity for “self-learning” that an online platform offers. In a fast-changing digital world, it’s essential to continually “test” yourself and reflect on what it is that you are doing.

I am a teacher. So, it is not surprising that “education” is one of the themes that I love to think about. I’ve already written several pieces about how education is disrupted in a digital age. In these pieces, I have mainly focused on the “digital impact” on the content, teaching methods, and the role of educators.

The responses indicate that most of us agree that in an age of “smart machines,” education must change. In particular, “soft-skills” and creativity become extremely important.

Jack Ma (founder of Alibaba), for instance, made it very clear recently during the World Economic Forum that we must teach the next generation to perform the tasks that technology cannot do. He was referring to art, sports, etc. We should focus on building a “skill-set” appropriate for an automated world where humans will “add value” through imagination and vision.

I really believe that education must change. But, I have come to realize that something is missing from this narrative and that there is a more fundamental problem that needs to be addressed first.

We don’t teach our students the capacity to self-study and self-learn.

Too much education today is “proceduralized” and “standardized,” and the inevitable result is that students expect and even demand to be “spoon fed.”

Of course, I understand the upside of having stringent processes and standards in place. We try to guarantee a certain uniform quality. However, the unintended downside is that we have “programmed” students to learn in a predetermined way. In general, everything in teaching focuses on the reproduction of knowledge in a test.

The result? Students want to know which pages of which textbook they must read to succeed. And these pages should directly match the content of the lecture. Otherwise, there are complaints. Most importantly, they want to know what kind of exam questions to expect.

The result? Students want to know which pages of which textbook they must read to succeed. And these pages should directly match the content of the lecture. Otherwise, there are complaints. Most importantly, they want to know what kind of exam questions to expect.

And just to be clear; I don’t blame students for this. It is a natural consequence of how we organize our whole education system.

So, before we can enter Jack Ma’s exciting new world of creativity-oriented education, we need to address this issue. Instead of anchoring teaching in processes and procedures that take all the flexibility out of education, we must focus on helping the next generation how to self-learn.

Or, as I said to one of my colleagues recently:

“We must TEACH them how to LEARN!”

This is particularly important in our digital and fast-changing world where information is readily available, new