RESUSCITATING EDUCATION Brainpower replaces Horsepower!
By Dilip Mukerjea
THE FIRST WONDER OF THE WORLD IS THE MIND OF A CHILD! The First Blunder of Governance is being Blind to the Child! The status quo of our education system lacks any status! What and where are the problems for our educators, students, and mandarins in governance?
1.Information Overload: causing tremendous confusion and panic. 2. Low Speed of Information Processing: causing unaffordable delays. 3. Poor Retention and Recall: Memory Logjam! Learning is sabotaged! There is no learning without memory! 4. Frozen Status Quo: Inability to break from the pack! Nothing grows in ice! 5. Inability to Adapt to Competitive Challenges: Famine of Ideas! Unable to use adversity as an asset; lack of self-efficacy! 6. Inability to Read and Comprehend Fast, Deep, Wide, and with Varied Extensivity: poor knowledge gathering and sense-making skills, inadequate translation into action! 7. Poor Idea Generation Capabilities: Brain blocked! Stuck in a rut! The status quo has no status! 8. Poor Articulation Skills: lack of eloquence in expressing thoughts, leading to low communication and high confusion! 9. Meagre Knowledge of The Human Brain, and How to Use It to Learn HOW TO LEARN, Fast! 10. Inability to Convert Ideas into Action, and to Move Ahead from Stress to Strength to Success!
Our KEY Leadership Challenge is to build adaptive organisations, with Learning Leaders, and Leading Learners, those with an ingrained ability to make sense of the changing environment, and then rapidly translate these insights into action. Our education system has become defunct! At best, our individuals with power and authority are ever busy but not productive!
What needs to be done? Fix the System, not the symptoms! As things stand, they are giving credence to the reality that we are the only example of a species that has been gifted with an organ it does not know how to use. Then Learn! Learn HOW to Learn! Stop stipulating and start stimulating!
We should be Championing Children, Fighting for their Futures, instead of racing full-speed to nowhere! The idiocy of being stuck in Capacity Building has checkmated Capability Building! Capacity is inadequate without Capability! OUR NATION HAS A GIGANTIC CAPACITY, YET BECAUSE OF LOW LITERACY LEVELS AMONGST THE MAJORITY, MOST OF OUR POPULATION IS STILL LANGUISHING WITH LOW CAPABILITY, IN THE STONE AGE! The Stone Age did not end because of having run out of stones! It did so because of superior thinking!
Innovation is the Bridge to the Future, but our architects of destinies fail to note that the choice today is Innovate or Evaporate! How do they sleep with a clear conscience when our children and their families are being short-changed?
LEARNING IS LIBERATION! EDUCATION IS OXYGEN! This being our sacred reality, why then are our institutions not burning for learning? Why are our so-called ‘teacher training’ edifices not bad, but hopeless? Training is for cats and dogs! Our teachers need to be encultured in Learning and Development! Learning HOW to Learn, so as to advance with exponential success.
Capability Building involves the acquisition of new competencies, the improvement of existing skills, and the cultivation of a mind-state that embraces continuous learning and improvement. Briefly, the top five Creative Capability Building Strategies comprise: • Modelling from the top down • Building from the ground up • Engaging a critical mass of people • Embracing remote technology • Making relevant, continuous small changes for raising standards and competencies The most sacred of all professions is to be a teacher, a good and great teacher! In this sense, teachers are the custodians taking care of our children’s destinies. They should thus be recognised and respected as our Guardians of the Future, instead of being taken for granted, or worse, panoramically ignored for their worth and value! This is the abysmal failure of governance! Good teachers need every benefit the States can accord them!
So what should our Learning Leaders and Leading Learners, our Brain-Force presiding over the prospects of our children do? They should be Statesmen-Leaders, who: • Show up: his or her presence is crucial for a full-fledged following to be created; • Speak up: the words frame the agenda, shape the issues, create the path to the Vision; • Look up: in humility, to receive the highest wisdom, and grace, going forward; • Team up: at a local and a global level, to manifest a sacred synergy for the greatest good; • Lift up: the hearts of the homeless, the hands of the helpless, the hopes of humanity; • NEVER Give up! press on, with perfect persistence and indefatigable determination.
When was the last time our political representatives visited their constituencies to check on the condition of the government schools in their areas? Are the impoverished students all receiving their midday meals?
To be relevant in the manifold contexts of the emerging world, and be globally competent, we need to possess cutting-edge skills that enable us to: 1. Investigate the world beyond any immediate environment, framing significant problems and conducting well-crafted and context-appropriate research. 2. Recognise perspectives, others’ and our own, articulating and explaining such perspectives eloquently, thoughtfully and respectfully. 3. Communicate ideas effectively with diverse audiences, bridging geographic, linguistic, ideological, and cultural barriers. 4. Act to improve conditions, viewing ourselves as transformative players in a volatile, uncertain, complex, turbulent, and ambiguous world, and participating reflectively.
Beware and Be Aware! The skills that help you be successful at one stage in your career and at one point in time are often a hindrance in the next stage. At the same time, in order to move to the next stage in your career you need to constantly be learning new skills. In business, this is the process of creative destruction, where you develop a new and better product that eliminates the need for your current product. In this process you are doing the same with your career.
So what must be done in terms of becoming skilled? We need to act on a CURED framework: CROSS-SKILLING: learners need to advance beyond their existing roles UP-SKILLING: to stay relevant to changes and evolutions in systems and processes RE-SKILLING: to remain relevant and up-to-date with any changes in our fields of work EXPERT-SKILLING: going in deep so as to become continually proficient across domains DE-SKILLING: allowing learners to focus more on a specific area instead of gaining half-hearted knowledge about multiple fields or areas without having expertise.
These skills need to be complemented by competencies in Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Strategic Thinking, Systems Thinking, and Design Thinking. The future calls upon our leaders to create and cultivate Millennium Minds: Unbeatable, Invincible, Unassailable, who need to be imbued with a Passion to Learn, the Humility to Unlearn, and the Urgency to Relearn.
The DNA of the Statesman-Leader is manifested in the DNA of the citizenry, its portals of governance, its corridors of business power, and its institutions of education. Such a leader is working toward a mind-state that will make the context a force in an uncertain world. Such leaders never hide when things shift, they push harder. They are not afraid to learn when new skills become necessary. They are not afraid to see opportunities where others only see chaos. We need Soul-Smart Learning Leadership, where our orchestrators of destinies act with vision, passion, discipline, and conscience…for the greatest good of all! I look forward to lauding and applauding this reality when it happens!
(The writer is a thought leader, breakthrough catalyst, innovation strategist & designer of a learning ecosystem and innovative landscape for nations, communities, organisations and institutions. He is also internayionally featured keynote speaker, accomplished author & corporate consultant)