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Education today: In search of innovation
The challenges the world is facing to make education more useful and meaningful are overwhelmingly multidimensional
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he challenges the world is facing to make education more useful and meaningful are overwhelmingly multidimensional.
The world has changed a lot in the past few decades — technologically and culturally — but schools are more or less still the same as they were a few hundred years ago.
In most northern, developed countries, young people are dropping out of schools, for reasons that are probably best described in the classic novel The Catcher in the Rye or in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society — where boring schools are failing angsty teenagers who crave more than just Straight-‘A’s.
“Nobel” laureate for education: H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Amir of the State of Qatar, hands the inaugural WISE Prize Award to Bangladeshi Fazle Hasan Abed (right) during the 2011 WISE summit in Doha on Nov. 1. Abed is the founder of BRAC, the world’s largest NGO that employs more 120,000 people in 10 countries to bring education to the marginalized and get them out of the circle of poverty. Courtesy of WISE
The United States is seeing about 1.2 millions school dropouts annually, according to a 2008 report. The OECD, in its latest report, ranked the UK among the countries with the worst education dropout rates in the developed world.
On the southern part of the globe, some children are left with no access to education; schools buildings are crumbling or located in a place so remote and isolated that children are forced to walk for miles to get there, with no guarantee to the quality of their education either.
It would not be easy for the world to reach its millennium development goal to ensure that 2015 that all boys and girls everywhere would be able to complete primary education. There remains about US$16.2 billion annual external financing gap between the amount of money needed to reach that goal and the domestic resources available for education.
We need to alter the way children are taught, some experts say. Students need to learn differently, other experts argue. And, yet, activists are still calling for more donations to bring the usual learning to the poor.
How are we going to address these problems?
Pedagogues around the globe gathered in Doha, Qatar, early this month to analyze what has gone wrong with the mainstream educational system and to seek creative solutions — they prefer the catchier word “innovations” — to deal with the multi-faceted problems plaguing education today.
The third World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) invited about 1,200 people — teachers, professors, policy-makers and journalists — to share best practices and to question the norms in education that might no longer be relevant to the changing societies we live in.
“Changing society, changing education” was chosen as the main theme for this year’s conference, which was organized by the Qatar Foundation. “Education is a global challenge, improving it requires a global commitment,” WISE chairman Abdulla bin Ali al Thani said about the conference. “We must deploy all of our talents, from all countries and all sectors of society to spread education, The problem cannot be addressed by governments and educators alone.”
The three-day meeting, however, apparently yielded more questions than solutions, given the complexity of the problems it tried to address.
Take the Internet, for example.The Web 2.0 is a revolution that has changed in various extents the way people interact, do business, or even instigate a social movement. The pressing question is, has education adapted to the online culture? Are we just bringing the traditional, obsolete teaching method online?
Wikipedia, an online and free encyclopedia, is one of the Web 2.0 revolutions affecting education worldwide, or at least in countries where students have become somewhat more dependent on the virtually omniscient search engine Google in doing their assignments.
The website is now ranked the fifth most visited website in the world and serving as a source of information for millions of Internet users, many of whom are also students. As it allows its users (or volunteers) to update or make correction on its entries, Wikipedia is practically the largest and most updated encyclopedia ever.
But there is, indeed, a downside for it. Critics said the online encyclopedia, which has become a transnational institution, favors wisdom of the crowd at the expense of accurate and balanced information.
Speaking at the Doha conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that he was aware of the flaws. But he added that it did not mean that students could not use the online encyclopedia for learning.Teachers could make use of Wikipedia for learning by asking students to point out the mistakes in its entries, Jimmy told a female Qatari medical student, who admitted to having become reliant on Wikipedia and was given the chance to ask Jimmy himself on how to use the website.
One of this year’s awardees, Freda Wolfenden, is the director of the Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA), an online network of over 20 universities and organizations from 12 African countries that provides multilingual high-quality resources for teachers and teacher educators.
Created in 1995, TESSA now provides 75 modules in 12 languages. These modules are used to train between 300,000 and 400,000 teachers a year in the region, where half of primary school teachers have few, or no, qualifications at all. The project aims to inspire teachers to adopt more imaginative ways to teach.
“We cannot change the curriculum in these countries,” Wolfenden says, “but we can gradually have an impact, culturally, on teaching methods.”
