Get rid of outdated mindsets for learners

Since the Covid-19 disruption came, it affected every sector of society worldwide. Everything we have called civil systems including education. Life cannot and will not go back to what it used to be. We should prepare our minds for a new and better different.

You are aware from latest information that continuity of learning in some countries will require standard operation procedures that must be put in place before schools can be allowed to re-open. Class sizes will need to go down to 10 learners per class . Something we need to talk about because that should have been the actual number of students per classroom.

Various countries worldwide are still weighing options as to when and whether to reopen schools for learners to resume learning in the formal schooling environment.

The question is how do we progress for life has to go on? We should progress towards a new and better different.

We have to accept that this disruption has to change what we have so far framed as a proper way to carry out education. The very word takes away from it the inate divine ability to let it be harnessed by discovery and minimum limitations.

There is always a viable solution to whatever surging we deem to be a challenge or crisis that’s the way we train our critical thinking skills.

Every human being is born with the latent potential to become whoever they dare to desire and imagine to be. That potential is dulled and numbed the day they start school and peg it to a grade.

Evolution

Educare which we now know as education since its formalisation is one of the pillars in shaping the minds of human resource to sustain its existence and advancement.

The Stone Age, Hunter’s Age, Voyegers Age, the Crusaders Age, Industral Age, Modern Age and now in the Tech Age soon to embrace and even supernatural better awareness of existence Age.

We have arrived at the door step of the 21st Century yet we still doggedly stick to an education format that’s schooling minds that have been given the expectation of unemployment and lack .

We are created to live abundantly using all 12 human faculties. If cultivated to fullness, they will produce a whole balanced human resource in spirit, body and soul.

Situation room

The dinosaur curriculum has over time made education a privilege yet it’s a divine latent ability in all waiting to be drawn out and mastered . Yes! We school, in box it, put a lid on it in the name of pass, fail, average and top scores.

We are continually sacrificing the numbers for quantity and compromising the quality. Yet both can be achieved if we leave the dinosaur approach of who, how, when , where educare must be given.

Have you seen how your children are packed like sardines in the dormitories! The classrooms are no different. And you are okay with this !

Wait for it ..... wait for it ...I can hear parents and guardians saying :

“We do not have time so we shove the children off to boarding schools so they can concentrate on achieving high scores in academics” it also frees us parents of our parental duties of shaping the minds to make ends meet.

This is your brood hello! It’s your parental responsibility to raise them as human beings who can fit in society .

No school is going to shape the character and attitude of your children. It’s starts at home .

Parents are making school choices today according to which school rates highest in national exam and high grade scores. They have at the back of their mind that this school will pump their children to score top grades so as not to struggle to find placement for them in the next best top scoring school factory.

School life is now driven by completing a standard test so that one can consider the work you successfully crammed to regagite back at the end of the academic year or phase .

We are going to see many private schools that are not able to embrace the new normal dying off. Schools have become get rich schemes at the expense of producing irrelevant content and human resource that is not in alignment to the 21st Century mindset.

Any educators, parents or policy makers still insisting I embrace the old way of the dinosaur are equally irrelevant and stuck in the 15th Century.

Future projections

Schooling life as we have formatted it has outlived it’s relevance in shaping the minds of the 21st Century human resource and the future beyond.

We all individually need to take personal interaction and initiative on how to best come up with a new way to mould the future of education from this point on.

We should not push to go where we haven’t yet ordered our minds to seek a new and better different.

Then there is this retirement (shouldn’t it be re- fire ment ) mindset that’s another dinosaur to bring down .

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Irene Ochwo is a 21st Century educator and thinker.