The world has changed. Times have changed. Our education system hasn’t.
We’re still taught what to learn instead of focusing on how to learn.
The biggest value in education is for people to understand how they function. Every one of us learns differently. The current system works like a lottery. It works for a few who walk out with confidence a true understanding of how to learn. The rest walk out with a clear understanding of all the things they think they are not good at.
Luckily, the times are changing. We are in a golden period of sorts in terms of understanding basic concepts like behaviour, happiness, intelligence and probably most importantly, understanding how to manage ourselves. Relatively new fields like behavioural economics are make the waves.
And, as I was thinking about this and bouncing these ideas with many around me, I feel the following big shifts in our thinking will happen.
– Energy will be THE focus. We will move away from time management and focus on energy management. We will understand how to think of a day in terms of our energy instead of thinking of a day in terms of time.
– How I work will take precedence over how stuff works. This is where the magic lies. Education will be reshaped to help us understand how WE work and focus less on how stuff works.
– Focus on ‘different’ versus ‘intelligent’. The easy option is to look at a person and judge them as intelligent or not. That’s how we’re schooled. And we automatically do the same for ourselves (surprise surprise). The issue, of course, is that we are extremely hard when it comes to judging ourselves.
We will begin to focus on understanding our different gifts. We are already beginning to see this. Susan Cain gave a powerful talk on the power of introverts. The principles in her talk are right out of Myers Briggs, who was just way ahead of her time. Again, it links back to understanding how we get our energy and how we work.
– A Learning a Day or Fluid Mindset. There are already many studied being made on mindset. What we are learning now is that our intelligence is NOT fixed. The more we do, the more we can do. The more we can do, the better we will start doing what we already do. Maximizing our potential and being the best we can be will be our focus.
I am obviously optimistic when I call that ‘a learning a day’ but it is something I envision will be taught in schools. Kids need to realize that they only get better. It took me 19 years to understand that and then a couple more years to understand that I must stop judging myself harshly. It’s all about figuring out how we work and that’s hard enough. We learn as we go. We fail a lot. But, thank god for that because the more we fail, the smarter we get.
This is the future in my eyes. It is not going to be easy to make these systemic changes. We are going to face a lot of resistance. That’s life though.
On the bright side, change is the only constant thing in this world. The dinosaurs go away and the world moves on.
It’s only a matter of time. The future is bright.
A Learning a Day 