What sort of learning do we need for the world we wish to live in?
Have you ever been to a school in another town or village? Or a school in another country, or different cultural context? Did it ever strike you as odd that they all look and feel pretty much the same?
Why, for example, is a school high up in the mountains of Pokhara, Nepal designed and functioning in the exact same way as a school in the jungles of Borneo, or the inner-city districts of Manchester or in the foothills of Kilimanjaro, Tanzania? In such a beautifully diverse world, how have we ended up with such a homogenised education system?
The core components of the existing dominant education system were designed to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution, with young people trained in whatever skills the job-market required. During this time of mass production, consumption, extraction and unlimited growth, the purpose of school (when first conceived for the masses) was simply to educate for the job-market: ironically many of the jobs which are driving the polycrisis we currently face.
Over recent history, a monoculture-model of education has spread across the world through colonialism, missionary work and more recently through globalisation; with a one-size-fits-all model imposed on communities and children right across the world.
Taken from their local context and community and educated into a Westernised education system that neither serves needs, talents, contexts nor local futures, the wider ripple effects of this factory-model education has reaped devastating effects on children across the world, through loss of culture and identity, language erosion, poverty increase and social unrest.
This model is broken and is no longer serving anyone.
One of the most inconvenient truths –perhaps the hardest to face - is that it is our education system which has taught us to see and be in the world in a way which literally goes against the fabric of the systems that we are living within and are a part of. It is - dare I say it - our education system (NB: the system, not the players) causing so many of the symptoms of ill-health we are now facing in our schools, lives and wider world.
We need to start addressing the ripple effects of learning and ask ourselves: "What sort of learning do we need for the world we wish to live in?"
Extract taken from 'The Future of Education' - a free publication by Rachel Musson, written for ThoughtBox Education.
Download your copy here: https://www.thoughtboxeducation.com/ebook