Education Matters

“Education is not the filling of the pail but the lightning of a fire”, once William R. Yerts said. It’s a pity, but we must admit that our present day educational system has reached a deadlock. Judge by yourself:  more and more youngsters lose a thirst for knowledge, they unwillingly attend classes and hardly ever crack a book. The thing is, they are sick and tired of being prepared to become just a bureaucratic machine parts. The teachers from the old school, instead of showing an initiative to bring something about change, assume that kids are just empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Will such standards of education keep up with the demands of the future society? Certainly, not. That’s why many distinguished scholars have put their thinking caps on to break the deadlock and give a proper education to the youths. I’ve been inspired by the the experts of the field Sugata Mitra and Sir Ken Robinson who suggested a way out, though some of their ideas seem to be a bit rough and provoking.
From the first glance, a key component in Sugata Mitra’s idea of creating self-organized learning environment is as easy as ABC: children can educate themselves by merely having access to the web. But to my mind, it’s not sensible enough to rely only on the cutting-edge devices despite the global computerization. The introduction of SOLE might be a huge challenge for those regions with no reliable electricity supply and Internet connection where teachers don’t have much technology to demonstrate. So, how can they offer enough practice to every gifted child not to fall behind with the studies? After all, even the main tools of SOLE – laptops - are slowly becoming obsolete since smartphones and tablets have nearly replaced them lately.

To continue, Mitras’so-called "minimally invasive education" turns out to be a bit naive since the absence of supervision along with the lack of basic knowledge would not be beneficial to students in the long run. Even if they’re motivated by the curiosity to acquire knowledge and are showing a marked improvement in their studies, only teachers can provide the required basis, uncover all tricky moments, giving the feedback to pupils. Besides, even eager beavers and quick learners can hardly organize the regular learning scheme as children’s concentration often wanders, saying nothing about those with low mental agility. Hence, only the combination of the instructor’s encouragement and brainstorming new material, as Sugata Mitra suggests, will help students to brush up on all subjects with flying colours.

         Finally, I take the view that Sir Ken Robinson’s ideas are more down-to-earth than those of Mitra’s and they can be successfully integrated into Ukraine’s educational system. According to the expert, the main point of education is to “get people to learn: stimulate, provoke and engage”. In fact, the suggested individualized teaching and encouraging curiosity is what our schools lack today, because “if the teacher can light the spark of curiosity in children, they will learn without any further assistance”. I can’t but agree that the individual approach to every student as well as paying more attention to studying process rather than testing will force the children to hit the books instead of cramming. 
      All in all, I honestly think that our leading educational authorities will take some points of the proposed ideas into consideration and put them into practice. Who knows, maybe very soon we’ll see the new generation of both straight A students learning for great pleasure and teachers lighting the spark of curiosity in their hearts. Please, consider all my ideas on improving Ukraine’s system of education put together in the mindmap below.