Why don’t we get the best out of acim? It’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies – far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity – are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences.
Children should be encouraged to answer boldly and not be afraid of being wrong, because if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong, by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
Our education system is outdated and is based on a hierarchy wherein most useful subjects for a job are considered to be the most important and academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. The modern educational system vastly underestimates the power of the human imagination.
More people, which highlights the importance of two points that need to be focused on- technology and its transformation effect on work. Suddenly, degrees are no guarantee for attaining a job. You need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. It indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us.
The honest truth is that no-one really likes change because it involves moving from a position of comfort and stepping into place which is unknown. As spectators we like to sit on the fence and applaud good ideas but refuse to change ourselves. Instead we think we can ride it out and somehow it won’t affect us. We like to argue and always focus on the negatives, pushing for decisions to be made and then criticising them. We tend to see change as an opportunity to learn and grow.
We have all experienced behaviour like this ourselves, it’s a natural human reaction. It’s a little easier to see it in others than ourselves but never the less, once you can recognise it, you can change it.
Governmental agencies and organizations that support and promote quality education for all children must move beyond traditional models to help children develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are relevant to their lives and that can lift them out of poverty. Mastery of the basic primary school curriculum is not the best means for improving life chances and alleviating poverty in developing countries, that model is broken. It is time to seek out the interventions that lead to the greatest social and economic impact for the poor.
The 21st century will require knowledge generation, not just information delivery, and schools will need to create a “culture of inquiry”. In the past a learner was a young person who went to school, spent a specified amount of time in certain courses, received passing grades and graduated. Today we must see learners in a new context:
