Does Education Need To Change?
By: Mart N
Tags: Teaching, Education

A while ago, I was tasked with the duty to create a Medium article on education. Before I was to do that, I had to read two articles. One of the articles was quite interesting and made me think. The article was: ‘In an age of robots, schools are teaching our children to be redundant,’ by George Monbiot. You may think I lack ideas to write about, but whatever you think, I think that this is a fascinating topic to talk about.

If you get a time machine and go back in time, go and ask people what they do at school. With all the answers you’ll gather, you’ll probably find out that, at its most basic form, education is just a period of time when children and teenagers go to school, and sit in a seat while being fed words by an adult. When you think about education today, how different is it from that description? Not much.

This brings me to my point. Throughout the course of time and history, humanity’s products have all evolved and changed with them. The phone has become touch screen and can do more than just call. The fan has become a machine instead of an instrument that requires motion to wave air. Many jobs have changed, with new ones being discovered and old ones being replaced by machines. So many things have changed. Yet why has education, something that has been around for years, not changed yet?

Education clearly isn’t perfect and the way the government and education department takes it can still be improved. If education was perfect, all students would have perfect scores. We don’t live in such an “ideal” reality however, so there is definitely room for improvement.

Some people may argue that just not all change is good. This is a perfectly valid argument as there have been situations in which change had a negative impact. One example is the creation of the cotton gin. In the late 1790’s, a man named Eli Whitney created the cotton gin. Its purpose would be used in cotton production, meaning it would replace slaves. Or would it?

Due to the vastly increased production of cotton, more slaves were needed to plant the cotton, turning this into a bad change for slaves. A video from TED-Ed goes into this slightly more. Although this is a bad change, we are able to learn from this change and create a new option, for example, by abolishing the legality of slaves and creating more mechanisms to do the work. It may be ironic to show how the education system may teach better, but it is a possibility.

I’ve been going on about change for a while, but I haven’t mentioned anything about how to change education. I’ll briefly discuss some of my ideas, but this topic may be a interesting one for you to ponder about.

I think that students in classrooms should be more interactive. This will promote a positive and friendly environment which will carry on into their working lives. School isn’t all about learning. It should also teach students moral standards and how to be a “good citizen”.

Another aspect of school I think should be changed is the grading system. I don’t think students should be graded on their intellect, but they should be on their effort and enthusiasm towards work. Students that do work easily without much effort, tend to not try and improve. This will not help them after they leave school as they will be faced with a new setting. Students that do try, however, will definitely improve. They may not have high intellect, but they will definitely do their best and may even surpass other students. I believe that promoting a student’s attitude to work is a great way for them to learn.

On a related note, my English teacher withholds grades until report day so that my peers are encouraged to try harder and improve. At first, I thought that it was a horrible idea. After all, how can we improve if we don’t know what we need to start from? Well, after thinking about it for a while, I realised that because students don’t know what they have, they tend to set expectations low and assume they haven’t achieved high. This will cause them to analyse what they have done more closely than usual and strive to improve. How students perceive work is a vital part of education.

— — — —

Whether you think education should be changed or not, I hope you write your opinions in the comments or even provide some constructive criticism for me.

Thank you for reading.