How to Overcome the Sustainability Crisis of Our Education System

While our past education system prepared us for the industrial era, we must make the necessary changes now to prepare our children and adults for the fast-paced technology era.

This means memorizing and repeating things the old-fashioned way don’t work anymore! 

Haven’t your children questioned you why to learn things this way when they can look up information online in seconds?

The way we are teaching people today affects how our economy will work in 5-10 years. We feel the tremendous pain of our ineffective ways of education.

Companies like Lensa, are tackling this issue in a way to help educational organizations promote better working conditions for new teachers.

While alone this is insufficient to make significant changes in our modern education, it is the first stepping stone to hire the right talent with the right mindset for the next generation of youngsters.

According to UNESCO, education system is facing a sustainability crisis. We can only overcome this by finding a long-term solution that serves everyone.

Including the needs of the bored-faced children and their overwhelmed parents, the worn-out teachers, and the impatient, fatigued adults.

We need to replace and revolutionize our calcified ways of thinking, teaching, practicing, and interacting with one another.

How to Change the Way We Instruct

By adjusting our methods that send controversial subconscious messages, and don’t foster our growth anymore.

These are valuing conformity over diversity, adherence to pre-set rules over autonomy, self-directed learning for memorization over creative thinking, individuality over collaboration, passivity over self-motivation, success over the importance of failure, and resilience for analytical cognitive skills over empathy and emotional intelligence.

We need to shift our focus from enhancing cognitive skills to motivating students for complex thinking and work. This is only possible if we come up with a different, modernized approach.

Today, we are mistaking information for intelligence. If you want to become successful, you need intelligence to navigate through the maze of life.

We as a people should recognize the value of applying and utilizing multiple viewpoints.

We reached a point, where we have no choice but to employ creativity, adaptability, and connect qualitative and quantitative methods so we don’t merely learn theory but also know how to apply them.

We need a more complex set of human competencies.

By switching to an all-around, holistic training routine we could realize the development we need. Not enough to see the necessary changes, and hope they will happen!!

How to Apply Innovative Solutions

We have plenty of resources available to educate ourselves in an open way.

But if we keep thinking in and applying closed systems, we cannot realize our full potential, and transcend our limited human existence. Closed systems are the death bed of creative talent.

First, we need to create open systems, that allows students to learn in a structured, contextualized, and personalized way, to leverage educational tools.

Rather than taking tiny steps of change, we would need a giant leap and keep only what we have learned from our old models. It should start by educating our children from early childhood.

Training our kids for a more effective, and livable life, so by the time they are getting an education they would know who they are, what they want to study and do in life.

Then, we should merge their studies with lots of useful practice in their chosen field for best results.

We can only achieve innovative education by stepping up to our current level of complexity. Ensuring our education and industry work together for a common goal, to gain equitable results for each student.

According to studies, lessons with physical engagement activate more brain areas, than traditional, lecture-based learning methods.

The students, who engaged in physical activities and work training, outperformed students of traditional education methods.

Focal Points to Consider

• Students learn more effectively through work-based learning rather than the traditional lecture and test format.
• Businesses are in growing need of soft skills, such as organizational skills, teamwork, public speaking, accountability, intelligence…
• In the modern business environment, employees are required to immediately start the ball rolling.
• We need innovative education to promote equity on a global scale. This enables our children to make the right career choices, encourages them to build contacts, and find both educational and work mentors.

Examples of Hands-on Tuition

• Mentors could help implement a plan for local nonprofits and NGO-s to attract younger volunteers and donors.
• Offering a local grocery chain help in developing a method to reduce food waste, and late product delivery to stores.
• Helping businesses in their data protection by testing their systems through creating challenges for prospective IT geeks.

Businesses should be involved in these developments and helping out with hands-on-tuition programs for the money that people spend.

By demonstrating problems on site, and describing how it affects them, they could indicate students solutions and offer support in sharing the tried and tested paths that haven’t worked.

This could multiply the development pace of both students, and business ventures.

Conclusion

We need changes in each of our systems to recreate educational, teaching, and learning structures.

Our education has become centralized, and its location had been taking place in buildings, in schools, campuses, libraries, etc., until the beginning of the pandemic at least.

In this way, we can control the educational processes. It was a useful method in the former era of information scarcity, today we can learn and work anywhere and anytime.

The solution to the challenges of switching from traditional ways of education to a modern version requires changing.

We could achieve this by fully discontinuing classroom teaching, and taking it instead into our workplaces and communities.

Children who were there while their parents worked in their business, or for an employer, prove how differently those kids evolved!

By processing skills and seeing solutions from an early age, as well as experiencing lifelike situations, our kids are provided with the best foundational tactics to tackle life’s ever-growing challenges.

It is also a good idea to motivate students to discuss their challenges and interpersonal problems after finishing their projects. Let’s think together!