Corona Virus; Lessons learnt. The need to change how we teach.

The current wave of the corona virus has undoubtedly brought the country to its knees. With businesses and schools shutting down, we’re being compelled to pause and ask; how does one earn without leaving home? Parents are wondering; what’s the alternative to conventional learning? Is homeschooling feasible?

Learning as we know it

This pandemic has exposed what some of us have known for years; that schools don’t really matter. We’ve been programmed to believe that our kids can only learn amply if certain conditions are met.

1. You need a one-size-fits-all curriculum for all learners of a particular age group: The curriculum board in Uganda has a really huge budget for this cause. We were taught that education is something you design and that the only way you can get good education is if it’s crafted well.
2. Learning has to be teacher controlled: Which explains why most text book publishers usually release a “teacher’s guide” along with the learners’ text book.
3. It’s also believed that we need to have a standardized form of assessment at the completion of the curriculum. The objective here is to judge the aptitude of the learner. A certificate is issued after successful completion of the exam. This certificate is a must-have for most.
4. And lastly, we put a very huge emphasis on grades. The learners with high grades are considered smart and are usually rewarded by the system. Their contemporaries with lower grades are frowned upon and regarded as failures. The parents of these “failures” are sometimes forced to walk with their heads low because the theory is that if your kid is not smart enough to get the good grades, chances are, you aren’t so smart yourself. The apple doesn’t fall so far from the tree.

The Elephant in the classroom.

I can’t stress hard-enough how this article isn’t an attack on teachers. I happen to love teachers a lot; my grandma Alice is a teacher and so is my sister Aisha. Teachers play a very huge role in our society. However, our veneration of them should not blind us from recognizing the flaws in our education system.

It’s a known fact that students will forget most of what they learn in class. I know this because we the adults have already forgotten most of what we learnt in class.

Research on how students learn has also revealed that deep and powerful learning requires a personal interest in what’s being learned. We simply can’t teach what’s on the curriculum.

Also, from experience I know that our grading system is counter-productive. The idea that grades are a necessary motivator for students is not just outdated but also misguided. Focusing on grades distracts teachers and students from what really matters: whether or not learning is really taking place.

Why we teach the way we do – the history of the modern class room

Lectures were created because back in the day, there was only one book. The one with the book would speak and everyone else would listen and note down.

Once you were able to replicate “the book”, you would then go out and lecture to another group. And that’s how information was transmitted.

But then we created the printing press and we no longer had one book. We had many books. However we continued to lecture anyway because we love tradition.

It’s this love for tradition that led us to the modern classroom. We love this modal so much, we’ve even recreated the modern classroom online. It is heart-breaking that with all the tech at our disposal, we still teach today like we taught 100 years ago.

Schools were built for a time that really doesn’t exist anymore. Schools were built for a time when if you wanted to learn something, you had to be in a particular place, at particular time, before a particular person, with kids from your neighborhood, going through a particular curriculum, at a particular pace and being assessed in a particular way.

This is the only learning modal that most of us know about. It’s the same modal we hope to pass-on to our kids. But that modal is beginning to crumble. Not just because of the Corona virus but because its 2020.

Why the system is crumbling

The biggest problem with the traditional school system is that it prepares kids for a traditional structured system of employment, that doesn’t exist anymore.

Innovation is taking over the world. Every structured job in the economy, if it hasn’t disappeared already, it will soon, so learners coming through education simply trained to follow instruction are kids that are going to be marginalized and obviously unemployed.

The Silver lining

The good news is that this evolution also present an amazing opportunity. If we could preserve the characteristics of risk taking and ingenuity in children the results will be limitless

School deliberately limits these types of characteristics and traits. Employers across the globe are increasingly looking at the value of these non-cognitive skills (also often referred to as socio-emotional skills).

Non-cognitive skills cover a range of abilities such as attention to detail, integrity, and interpersonal interaction. These skills are critically important to the learner, both in and beyond the classroom. They form a critical piece of one’s skill set.

These skills are also becoming more important as trends like automation shift the skills needed to compete in today’s fast evolving job market. The work place measures us based on how much we can do, not how much we know.

Learning from Home

More than 5 million families across the world were already homeschooling their children before the Corona pandemic. They are doing it with technology driven programs like Khan Academy and Coursera.

Why homeschooling is the new normal

I believe that even after Corona virus is gone, homeschooling is going to be a part of our education system because of some of these trends:

• More parents are starting to work from home and this is a trend that is going to continue.
• There’s a growing demand for individualized education. The standardized curriculum is outdated.
• The cost of standard education keeps going up. On the flip side the cost of alternative education keeps going low.

Why Adults can’t educate children.

In his book, The Thomas Jefferson Education, Oliver Demille writes, “It is impossible for one human being to educate another.”

You cannot educate a child, you can only inspire them to educate themselves. When learning is student driven, it doesn’t stay in the walls of the classroom, it takes on a life of its own. Kids with access to internet are learning more online than they do in school.

So, if it’s not possible for me to force-feed knowledge into my little girl, I have to learn to be a facilitator, rather than an educator or teacher.

What happens to home schooled students?

Peter Grey, research prof at Boston College discovered the following in his research about the lives of homeschoolers:

• 83 % of home schooled students pursue university education.
• 80% work in creative fields.
• 40% work in STEM fields (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
• 50% + are entrepreneurs.
• 100% seek impactful creative work.
• None ended up working in the banking or financial industry.

Famous people who have been homeschooled

• Thomas Edison.
• Serena and Venus Williams.
• George Washington.
• 14 other US presidents including Abraham Lincoln.
• Christina Aguilera.
• Albert Einstein.
• Maria Sharapova.
• Charles dickens.
• Colonel Sanders – KFC founder.
• Justin Timberlake.