Let our students assert themselves
All my life I have been involved in education but I have also spent ample time in the real world to make my own assessment of the actual connections between one and the other.
I have seen much improvement over the decades. Let’s first make that observation. The old academic ivory towers are items of the past. Schools, colleges and universities have become much more – generally - responsive to the needs of society and our information and communication capabilities have revolutionized many learning processes. However, we continue to largely project our own interpretation of the world on our children, which we do in the disguise of knowledge transfer. We fail to systematically engage them into the real world. We do not sufficiently get our students to develop their own views of it as a basis for their ventures in the future and or help them to lay a proper foundation for their own career.
Many senseless, irrelevant programs are offered in our colleges and universities. We tend to overemphasize knowledge and invest much less in the actual development of the students’ capabilities. It may seem a paradoxical statement, but many fashionable curricula which allegedly connect knowledge with its (real life) application, offer yesterday’s solutions at best and do not actually challenge the capabilities of students to identify relevant issues themselves and mobilize the required expertise. In fact, the expertise which the students end up with is very thin or shallow; they know very little about almost everything.
Secondly we have steered the notion of competence driven education into much too narrow alleys. Whilst the concept offers useful parameters to design a curriculum at the appropriate level and to help create its focus, the actual investment in our students should be much broader. It is vital we get away from too much standardization and allow more room in our program to cater for the students’ individual qualities .
I believe most of all that the current generation of students has a great challenge to face. Not simply to make sense of the myriad of options, this bombardment of opportunities, almost in every aspect of their lives: education, culture, consumer markets, entertainment etc. Not simply this, but also to take command of their own path, their own education and development, based primarily on their own needs and interests.
More substantially this is what the current younger generation should take on board:
- to be responsible for themselves and for the development their own capacities/capabilities
- to assert themselves in the face of everything that is presented to them, in education, culture, politics, markets etc
- to create their own themes and signature irrespective of the commands of the curriculum, and shape their own identity accordingly
- to be highly cooperative among each other (most of what students can learn, they can learn from their fellow students)
- to pro-actively make their own inquiries – and develop their own approaches – (in)to the outside world
- and finally, to make sure that what schools teach them is indeed what they should learn
The current board of the Dutch National Student Association ISO
More than ever schools and universities are the extended arm both of their students’ parents and of society at large. We should provide for an education system which takes the interests, talents and perspectives of the students as the starting point. Curricula should guide this process but not rigidly determine, let alone confine it. Obviously, for most true professions such as the medical, legal and engineering professions entry qualifications should prevail, but students should be allowed to choose their own path to getting there, at least more than is the case at present.
I am a strong proponent of an approach to education that treats the process of knowledge transfer as a supporting process. The key process is not teaching, but is the actual learning of the students themselves, in all their variety and different learning styles and learning capabilities. Educators, not simply teachers, should be there to guide and coach the students, independent from those responsible for the education program.
Secondly education is to cater for the future and not to enforce the past on our younger generation. Every educational environment should be particularly inviting on that score: in the way it draws its students to the real world and not simply to the books and theories at school.
My third and last point is that we have treated students mistakenly as "clients", almost as objects. The reality is that they are the main producer themselves of "our output". We should view ourselves as their partners, most certainly not as their adversaries or as adults who always know better. We don't.
Why isn’t this evident already. Why do we so strongly adhere to telling rather than showing? We should push our students to experience the world themselves and liberate them from school buildings with too many teachers around them who have no clue of the real world, let alone of the competences required to properly survive and thrive in it.
