#002 - Rethinking the Factory Method of Education 🏭🤔

Speaker: 00:00:00

Welcome to Neuroeducation, where we're exploring the neuroscience of how to switch on the brain to supercharge learning. I'll be sharing with you innovative teaching techniques, effective parenting strategies, and educational advocacy. I'm your host, Angie Dee. Together, let's revolutionize children's learning. Hi everyone and welcome to our podcast on neuroeducation. Thank you so much for being here today. What is our current method of education and is it indeed still the factory method of education that was created almost a hundred years ago back after the world wars? If we look at our education system and the actual structure that we currently have, we have children in the same age bracket moving through a system year after year regardless of what they've learned or regardless of how well they have learned it in a very competitive standardized way. There is a famous quote by Albert Einstein and he says everybody is a genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will go on its whole life believing that it's stupid. Now, we have so many fish just like this in our education system today. Some people say it's like trying to put a round hole into a square peg or a square peg into a round hole. And what we have is children that have so many talents, so many unique talents. that are anywhere from creativity, arts, music, dance, drama. If you think about all of the facets that people do in this day and age, there are so many things that our children are capable of. And yet in school, when we test for academic intelligence, we're just testing for this incredibly small scale of what is actually a part of an intelligence of our human system. What we have is by Howard Gardner's incredible multiple intelligences show us that people can be talented in the area of music, in linguistics, talented in the arts, talented maybe, you know, there are some of my friends that just love data and all they want to do is study their data. They love accounting. So everyone has these unique talents. But what we're doing is taking all of these talents and then testing them individually and children that are incredibly brilliant and incredibly bright, that have so much to offer the world, go around thinking that they're stupid. And what does it do to their self-esteem? It breaks them. And as soon as you think that you're stupid and you have nothing to offer, you basically Stop trying. And we have a lot of children out in our education system, in our schools, sitting down at tables and chairs, staring at the teacher who's telling their content. They don't believe in themselves. They've already been told they're stupid because the test that they took last week for some person in government, who probably doesn't care less about the children, showed them that they failed the subject. And they're going to carry that through. Well, what we need to do is think about here is our education system, which primarily favours English, maths, maybe science as the top three tiers of the height of excellence. And in Queensland, it's even worse because the arts, which we know are essential for innovation and the most important qualities in the 21st century, are not even counted in some of the year 12 subjects. If you take an art subject, sometimes it's not even counted 12 year, year 12 results. This is a travesty. And it's going against what we know is so important in our 21st century. What qualities do we need to succeed? What qualities do our children need to succeed in the 21st century? There are study after study showing us that creativity and innovation are our top two qualities that children need to succeed in education. And what we have is an education system that is asking children to read questions and regurgitate information. There is nothing creative or innovative about that. Absolutely nothing. And what we need to do is to, I would say, revolutionize our entire education system to be able to put these two qualities of creativity, innovation on a pedestal back at the top of the priority of where it should be. Because they did one incredible study of a 1,500 industry leaders. And in this study, what they found are the top two qualities that industry leaders are looking for when they employ people are creativity and innovation. And Kodak is a perfect example of this. If you're in my generation, you can remember Kodak was the biggest printing company out there. You couldn't imagine a world without Kodak, but what happened? It didn't innovate and it was, it was obliterated. In this day and age, we have changes every five seconds to every kind of technology, whether it's an app, whether it's a data reporting, whatever it may be. And if companies don't innovate, they die. So what we need to be teaching our children is how to innovate, how to change, how to create because what you have is a world that you're currently teaching children for that does not yet exist. The world that we're creating The world they're creating, we can't even imagine. If you can fathom the changes that have happened in the last decade, we need to be basically teaching our children skills and qualities that prepare them for later in life. Creativity, innovation, ingenuity and resilience. And amazingly, another study showed one of the other important aspects for learning to succeed in the 21st century, lo and behold, were your social skills. If you go back to the 1950s and you see who did well academically at school and how did that show how well they succeeded later in life, sure enough, there was a comparative between how well they succeeded academically and their success in life. However, in this day and age, we now have how well children succeeded in their social skills are directly showing how well they succeed later in life. It's called soft skills and there is an amazing amount of study that goes now into how well soft skills, that means their social skills, are impacting their success later in life. If we look at our current method of medication, 30 kids, 30 tables and chairs, doing the same thing at the same time, listening to information, reading information and regurgitating information, literally the lowest form of teaching and the lowest form of learning, we need to look at how that has to change. We need an absolute revolution in education and we need to start by introducing the skills that they're going to need to succeed in the 21st century. Creativity, innovation, resilience and their social capacity. So we need to get children talking and we need to get children creating and succeeding for the world for which they're to create. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. Please subscribe. The best thing you can do for our podcast is to give us our review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Subscribe on YouTube and all the links will be down below for more information. Thanks again and see you on the next episode.