Old School New Way Of Learning

Old School? New Way of Learning? December 9th, 2008 There have been too much talking about “how school should adapt themselves to the age of globalisation”. In fact, one question could be that “does the school really realise and in what degree they realise how critical this can be for today’s education and students.” Time magazine released an article in Y2006, . It started with a joke, Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after 100 year snooze, he could not recognize this world where it was used to be in 1906 due to the very much development, only by finally he walks into a schoolroom he knows where he is. “This is a school, we used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green.” Yes, the schoolhouse, the classroom, the way of teaching, the way of learning do not change following the fast development of economy, politics, society, culture, technology. Students today learned the same way their great-grandparents did: “sitting in rows, listening to teachers lecture, scribbling notes by hand, reading from textbooks that are out of date by the time they are printed. A yawning chasm (with an emphasis on yawning) separates the world inside the schoolhouse from the world outside.” (from Time) But today’s world and economy has been changed so much, it requires different and more sophisiticated skills to survive and get ahead. Today’s economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here’s what they are: Knowing more about the world. Kids are global citizens now, even in small-town America, and they must learn to act that way. Mike Eskew, CEO of UPS, talks about needing workers who are “global trade literate, sensitive to foreign cultures, conversant in different languages”–not exactly strong points in the U.S., where fewer than half of high school students are enrolled in a foreignlanguage class and where the social-studies curriculum tends to fixate on U.S. history. Thinking outside the box. Jobs in the new economy, “put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” (Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy). Kids also must learn to think across disciplines, since that’s where most new breakthroughs are made. It’s interdisciplinary

combinations–design and technology, mathematics and art–”that produce YouTube and Google,”(Thomas Friedman, author of ) Becoming smarter about new sources of information. In an age of overflowing information and proliferating media, kids need to rapidly process what’s coming at them and distinguish between what’s reliable and what isn’t. “It’s important that students know how to manage it, interpret it, validate it, and how to act on it,”(Karen Bruett, Dell executive) Developing good people skills. EQ, or emotional intelligence, is as important as IQ for success in today’s workplace. “Most innovations today involve large teams of people, we have to emphasize communication skills, the ability to work in teams and with people from different cultures.” (Norman Augustine, former Lockheed Martin CEO) Fairly speaking, it’s difficult for students to get aware how much the world is flat and how much this will influence their future by staying inside an ivory tower. Therefore educational organisations, institutions and enterprises should take more responsibility to provide platform, product, service, communities to students to broaden their horizon, to expand scope of cross-culture interaction for them, to really enable them to think and act globally. This is also mission for Students Space. It strives on this way.