Why do we need to rethink schooling?
Many schoolchildren has mental disorders
The number of schoolchildren suffering from anxiety, depression, stress, ADHD and other mental disorders has increased rapidly during the last 15 years. The problem has worsened as both our societies and technological surroundings have changed rapidly, while the traditional school system has preserved its learning principles deriving from the 18th century.
We are dealing with a global school crisis, and it has not been initiated deliberately nor been caused by any individuals. It has developed slowly, and it is comprehensive and systematic, why we need to solve it as a society.
Creativity is important
Creativity has been never been more important on the labor market, and it will be even more important in the future. Creative activities also have a positive effect on our happiness, yet we are educating children away from this innate skill.
A comprehensive creativity study spanning for 17 years, suggests that all children are born with a high level of creativity. In early childhood this innate and intuitive skill is used in our development, when we learn to move, communicate, explore the world and so on. Unfortunately, this natural and intuitive development is being disregarded for most children, when they start formal education.
Creativity is being unlearned in school
The study also revealed that if you are educated through the principles of traditional schooling, your creativity is most likely weakened. In the study, 98% of 5-year-old children were operating at a creative genius level before they entered school, while only 2% of 25-year-olds were operating at the same creative genius level.
Do schools kill creativity? It is a very relevant question to ask, and also the title of the most viewed TED Talk of all time. The 20-minute video went viral because of its great delivery by Ken Robinson, but more importantly and eye opening because of its precise criticism of our society.
When did traditional schooling become a problem?
To understand why many of today’s schoolchildren feel inadequate or develop mental disorders, we need to look at the beginning of the traditional schooling system. An educational approach that was developed and implemented worldwide, when the First Industrial Revolution was on the rise.
The system was designed to create obedient citizens and manageable workers who could do monotonous factory work, that did not require creativity or curiosity. This form of work has created the societies we live in today, but the repetitive work has since diminished and more rapidly since the arrival of the Internet.
The outdated principles
The traditional schooling system has four distinctive learning principles:
1. Learning through obligation
2. Standardized measurements
3. Predetermined curriculums
4. Fixed schedules
Learning through these principles has been a reality for most children in the past centuries, and we are very used to this way of learning as a society.
Though we have used these principles for the past 30 generations, they are not the right tools to use in 21stcentury education.
Adapting is not always a good thing
By adapting these external learning principles, we downgrade our internal learning principles. When we have no intuitive influence on the topics we learn, we suppress our self-developed learning methods and individual desires.
Furthermore, the learning principles of traditional schooling are requiring teachers to assess children in all their doings. When children are being rebuked for not following the class, they instinctively adapt, and this constant monitoring and lack of influence blurs their intuition and creativity.
The ability to learn is innate
We need to trust the human intuition and acknowledge that all children have the ability and capacity to learn and do great things. It is a general misunderstanding that traditional schooling is the correct or only way to acquire knowledge.
To function and flourish in the modern world our innate and individual skills needs to be nurtured and cultivated, not suppressed in order to fit an outdated conformity. If you consider the current levels of stress, depression and anxiety in our schools and societies, the school system is performing as an obstruction rather than a transit to a happy life.