By Dilip Mukerjea
All children must be given the chance to be all that they can be.
Our education system is, at best, wounded, a victim of cataclysmic neglect; at worst, it is a cognitive holocaust, wrecking lives and livelihoods, far from future-proofing our children! All children will be more likely to become all they can be if their families have access to high quality care (meaning, they are lovingly nourished and nurtured), especially during their early years, access to high quality education from pre-primary school to university, and access to good healthcare throughout their lives. All this is crucially linked to the mandarins in positions of governance … or should I say, the present MIS-governance! Is red tape all that is holding our societies together?
Education transforms lives and must exist at the heart of a human mission to build peace, eradicate poverty and drive sustainable development. We are facing unprecedented challenges – social, health, economic and environmental – driven by accelerating globalisation and a faster rate of technological innovations. Yet, those forces are providing us with myriad new opportunities for human advancement…even in the face of ‘artificial intelligence’ impelling the genesis of the world’s first non-organic life forms! Our educational institutions must reskill and upgrade themselves to prepare our children for jobs that have not yet been created, for technologies that have not yet been invented, to solve problems that have not yet been anticipated. It will be a shared responsibility to seize opportunities and find solutions. To navigate through such volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and turbulent scenarios, students, and educators, will need to develop curiosity, imagination, resilience and self-regulation; they will need to respect and appreciate the ideas, perspectives and values of others; and they will need to cope with failure and rejection, to move forward in the face of adversity.
Crucial challenges that confront ‘education’ today
(1) Information Overload;
(2) Low Speed of Information Processing;
(3) Poor Retention and Recall: Memory Logjam;
(4) Frozen Status Quo: inability to break from the pack!
(5) Inability to Adapt to Competitive Challenges: Famine of Ideas!
(6) Inability to Read: fast, deep, wide, and with varied extensivity;
(7) Poor Idea Generation capabilities;
(8) Unawareness of Strategic Visioning imperatives;
(9) Meagre Knowledge of the Human Brain;
(10) Inability to Move Ahead from Stress, to Strength, to Success!
There is mounting evidence of the benefits to humankind of an inclusive societies’ approach when we cast our eyes on the following areas of concern:
The positive evidence of ‘inclusivity’ embraces a broad range of societal outcomes. Development benefits of inclusive societies are increasingly present in donor policy thinking and global dialogues, including the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals framework. The desired impacts encircle economic benefits, social cohesion, and sustainable peace.
Economic Growth, Productivity and Employment
There is mounting evidence of the impact of inclusive growth approaches on reducing poverty and inequality, prejudice and bias, discrimination and bigotry, xenophobia and apartheid, when excluded groups gain greater access to education, employment, and business opportunities.
There is panoramic evidence that gender equality can catalyse economic growth, with positive impacts on macro-level growth, human capital, resourcefulness in deployment of labour, and in agricultural productivity.
Other Development Outcomes, Including Societal Wellbeing
Greater efforts must be made in encouraging free expression, to ensure the impact of voice, empowerment, and accountability approaches towards broad development outcomes, to ensure the advance from harm to harmony.
The education of women and girls is crucial for spurring economic empowerment. It has already contributed to postponed marriages, lower fertility rates, and improved health and education outcomes for future children.
In-depth qualitative case studies demonstrate the strong positive effect of efforts to make services more inclusive and improve progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, benefiting broader swathes of society.
Social Cohesion, Peace and State-Building
There is research pointing to the positive relationship between peaceful societies and more inclusive states with state-society relations based on legitimacy rather than coercion, and greater associational life that generates trust and inter-group cohesion.
Evidence suggests inclusive political settlements and broader political processes are essential for fostering peaceful societies.
Social cohesion is a positive force in terms of transforming consciousnesses and consciences, so that we can heal our wounded planet and establish sustainable societies that deliver outcomes in alignment with the Triple Bottom Line of Sustainability: Economic Prosperity, Social Justice, and Environmental Wellbeing.
The winning outcomes towards future-readiness via applied imagination
• Self-Efficacy in and across the teacher-learner-leader culture.
• Teachers become SuperTeachers! Their Employability Quotient soars!
• Children become SuperLearners! No more cramming! No more panic!
• Leaders rise to Statesmanship!
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has launched The Future of Education and Skills 2030 project. The aim of the project is to help countries find answers to two far-reaching questions:
• What knowledge, skills, attitudes and values will today’s students need to thrive and shape their world?
* How can instructional systems develop these knowledge, skills, attitudes and values effectively?
Teachers, students, families, and the citizenry at large, will need to be imbued with motivation that will be more than getting a good job and a high income; they will also need to care about the well-being of their friends and families, their communities, and all life on the planet.
Some factors that should make us think about the future of teaching:
*The majority of children in their first year of nursery school will enter careers that do not exist now, involving technologies and cultures that have not yet emerged.
* Employees will change professions, and careers, not just jobs, at least 4 or 5 times during their working lifetime.
* The majority of employees will work for companies having less than 200 people.
*The amount of information in the world is doubling every few months.
* When Year 2 students complete Year 12, the body of knowledge will have doubled almost 10 times since 1988.
* Today, engineers find that half their knowledge is obsolete in 5 years.
* Children born in the year 2025 will live to minimum 90 (or more) years old on average compared with 75 for children born in 1986 … pertaining to the ‘developed’ world.
* Graduates will have been exposed to more information in one year than their grandparents were in a lifetime.
* 90% of information and knowledge required in the year 2030 has yet to be invented.
* A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to receive in 17th century England.
* There is more computing power in a musical birthday card than existed in the world in 1950.
* What we call “video gaming” today, will soon emerge as the most powerful learning medium in history.
Leaders in the Education Domain: Never let a democracy become a ‘lootocracy’! Please rise to your highest possibilities, for the greatest good! Beware, and be aware! You can choose to be ‘in action’ or in ‘inaction’. Are you ‘looking’ to win or ‘overlooking’ the prospect of victory? Think about this: we cannot be great unless we are a part of something greater than ourselves. We possess the entelechy to ‘realise’ with ‘real eyes’ our unique worth and value, but if we ignore our possibilities, our life shall be one of ‘real lies’. Is that what we should wish for? Do we wish to be mere passengers in our life? If we have goals, we need to pursue them with laser focus and fervency.
Our custodians in positions of power and influence must lead not only by the example of their power but by the power of their example.
The key to success is to stop conforming to other people’s expectations and start performing according to our highest possibilities. We have to learn to work harder on ourselves than on our jobs. If we work on our job we will make a living. If we work on ourselves, we will make a life. STUDY, PRACTISE, TEACH, and help to heal our beleaguered world.
With great leadership, a new dawn can emerge for our citizenry across the planet, to enjoy physical health, emotional balance, mental clarity, and spiritual awakening. Everything rises and falls on leadership: learning leadership, and leading learnership! With a stainless conscience, may the civil servants perform with civility and ‘crusadorial’ commitment, the ministers in their ministries, with moral mindfulness, and the people at large, with open-hearted valour to fight against the malaise that presently prevails!
(The writer has authored several books including SUPER-CREATIVITY among others)