Education should be evolving and dynamic, changing to meet a student’s needs. Education needs to be designed to meet the needs of the individual learner, not the needs of the many.
The current educational system was designed over 100 years ago to ready a society to work in an industrial era. It no longer suits the needs of today. While this assembly line school model may work for some, many children need more. In this model students are ushered through grade levels regardless if they have understanding of the content. This may leave them with serious educational gaps. Others, whose pace in may exceed that of their classroom peers, are often denied the opportunity to explore beyond the grade’s standardized curriculum.
Today’s education system focuses on right and wrong answers. Standardized testing, which usually involves multiple choice questions, has become the accepted measure of a school’s success. While this may be appropriate in certain situations, it limits the student’s thought process. It encourages simple memorization and rote learning. This type of learning is measured easily and shows as high grades on a student’s report card. However, once the student leaves the school environment society expects he or she make decisions which involve more than A, B or C choice. In life answers to questions are not often black and white. Adults have to pull from previous knowledge and apply this information to solve complex problems. This is critical thinking which is required of an adult and like many things in life it has to practiced. The exercise of critical thinking needs to taught at a young age. Today’s world requires the ability to absorb, analyze, and apply content. Our children will be expected to innovate not regurgitate information in life.
Learning should not always be about having the right the answer, sometimes it’s about arriving at the wrong answer and learning from the process, redoing, resilience, persistence and having confidence to allow yourself to make the mistakes. At Triad this not only allowed, but encouraged. It’s about fostering curiosity, creating life long learners, doing our best to make learning enjoyable.
critical thinking – edglossary.org/critical-thinking/
rote learning – education.cu-portland.edu/blog/curriculum-instruction/what-is-rote-learning/