Does the school system work in this day and age?

What is wrong with the present day school system?

Sugata Mitra, the winner of the TED prize in 2013 explained that the present day school system was started by the British Empire to produce the bureaucrats needed to run the Empire.  These bureaucrats had to have the ability to read, write legibly and do math.  They had to all have the same skills so if one couldn’t work, another could take his place.  There was no thought of creativity or innovation.

Our schools today run pretty much the same way.

• Children are bored and then told they are hyper active and given Ritalin.
• Learning is done individually and students are tested alone.  If they study together and make the same mistake, they will be accused of cheating, a fatal sin. In places of business, people need to work in teams.  So why in school is teamwork considered cheating?
• Students are instilled with a fear of failing tests.  They often panic before taking tests, forget everything and  fail.  Since panic causes all the creative parts of the brain to shut down, it is understandable that so many students have test anxiety.
• Children are taught to learn facts that can easily be accessed on the internet.  A month later, they forget most of them.  If so much information is available at the click of the mouse, why do they have to memorize it?
• They are expected to answer the questions the way the teacher taught them.  There is little room for creativity and independent learning.
• The good teachers are sent to the good schools as a prize and new inexperienced teachers go to the harder schools where they have trouble coping and then the gap between the good schools and bad schools becomes bigger.

What is the solution?

Mitra found a method to overcome most of these problems.  He developed a system called “schools in a cloud” which is based on “child driven learning”.

He discovered that if children have interest, learning will happen.  They don’t need a school or a teacher.  Just a computer.

Computers in the Wall

After hearing from friends how their children learned how to use a computer by themselves, he wanted to see if only children from good families can understand computers. He put a computer in a wall, at a level that children can reach, in a slum in India. He connected it to the internet and left it.  The children in the area didn’t even know English.  When he returned 2 months later they had figured out how to use the computer.  Older children, age 10, were teaching younger ones, who had to stand on tip toes to see the screen.

He continued his experiments and found out that children can learn almost anything if they have curiosity and are given access to the right tools.

He found out that by learning in groups, and talking between themselves about what they learn, they remember it better over time.  Instead of forgetting most, if not all of what they learned after a few months, the children who learned together got the same scores 2 months later.  They sometimes even got better scores because they continued to learn more.

He had the children work in groups of 4 with one computer per group. By letting them see what other groups were doing and then bring the information back to their group, all the children were able to find the answers that were posed to them and remember them.  Encouraging this kind of “cheating” during the learning process, was beneficial to all the children

Granny Cloud

Another approach he used to encourage the children was what he called the “Granny Cloud”.  What do grandmothers do?  They applaud their grandchildren, tell them how smart they are and encourage them to do more.  By having cyber grannies encourage the children, their performance improved.

What can we learn from this for the school system?  Maybe the job of teachers isn’t as much to teach as to spike curiosity about a subject, let the children find the answers themselves and encourage them when they are on the right track.

In my opinion, instead of tests, there should be evaluations so students can see what they already know and know what they still have to study.  If there are no grades, there are no failures.  The evaluation makes sure you know one level of learning and can move to the next.  Students can advance at their own pace.  Even better, they can work in groups of mixed levels, the faster students helping the slower ones and they will all advance together.

A good teacher is usually one who makes the subject they teach interesting.  So that is the key to teaching. Instilling a desire to know.

What do you think?  Is the educational system as it is today doing what it should? 

Could these ideas help improve it?   Do you have other ideas?