Educating for the Future: Are we failing our kids?

It is not a secret that many education systems are geared towards results and certificate at the detriment of other skills development and most importantly towards future job skills. What should be done to prepare our children for the future world of work? News on Sunday reports.

The world’s education systems are failing our children by not preparing them for the workplace of the future. This is the key finding of a new report by the World Economic Forum, “Realizing Human Potential in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” – which puts forward a series of practical measures for aligning education and training with future job requirements. News on Sunday spoke to local experts in view of getting an oversight of the situation in Mauritius.

Technology and globalisation continue to reshape business models across all sectors and geographies, creating new types of jobs and disposing of old ones at great pace. However, monolithic, underfunded education and training systems around the world have fallen short of responding to this trend. This means that by the time they leave education, as many as two-thirds of children entering primary school today will not have the skills required to get a job. The impact will be worse for women who already have less than two-thirds of the economic opportunity that men have. The report was put together by a panel of business leaders, policy-makers, unions, educational institutions and academics. It recommends that governments and the private sector work together in eight core areas to ensure the world’s children are equipped for the future. Here are the main findings of the report on how to reinvent education for the future.

1. Focus on the early years: Reinventing education starts in early childhood, where the focus should be on literacy and reading. Adequate childcare provision for working parents will be critical in both developed and developing economies.

2. Keeping it dynamic: Training curricula must be aligned with market demand for skills – both job-specific and generic, such as problem-solving and project management. The challenge will be to keep these curricula dynamic and responsive to evolving business needs. In Finland, one of the world’s top-performing nations in education, the curriculum is updated regularly to provide an overall framework, with room for local adaptation by the schools themselves.

3. Open-sourcing education: The report advocates adopting training innovations more quickly, opening up to alternative learning routes (such as Hackathons) and allowing for experimentation with new techniques. For example, the New York City Department of Education has created “Lab” schools and tasked them with reinventing teaching and learning. In Ghana, the US and France, schools are pioneering short courses in coding based on peer-to-peer teaching, project-based learning and gamification.

4. Taking teachers out of the ivory tower: To bring education and business closer together, the report recommends initiatives such as teacher “externships” in businesses, workplace mentoring and involving the private sector in teacher training.

5. Giving students a sense of the real world of work: Similarly, students should experience the world of work from early on – for example through internships and ongoing career coaching – to help them see a variety of career options and the skills required.

6. Addressing the vocational stigma: Vocational and technical education is critical to the world economy but has been neglected and often looked down on as second best. The World Economic Forum advocates promoting vocational and technical career paths more proactively and raising the quality of vocational training on offer. For example, Germany’s vocational training system sees apprentices divide their days between classroom instruction and on-the-job training at a company. Apprentices are paid and their training typically extends to between two and three years. Not only does this approach create an excellent talent pool, it also smoothes the – often difficult – transition from education to the world of work.

7. Digital fluency: Digital skills will be fundamental to a wide range of careers, but “digital fluency” is not a given. The report highlights the need for a greater focus on ICT in teacher training and students’ work placements to address the growing digital skills crisis. One successful example comes from India, where the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has partnered with NGOs and the Government of India to build National Digital Literacy Centres across the country to enable digital literacy.

8. Education, education, education: Given the rapid evolution of the job market, workers can no longer rely on just one skill-set or narrow expertise to sustain long-term careers. The report advocates incentivising employees to commit to lifelong learning so they continue to develop their skills or even retrain for new roles. For example, in Singapore, individuals receive an annual training allowance they can spend on a range of training courses all geared towards developing future-oriented skills.

The fourth industrial revolution will turn the world of work as we know it on its head as it continues to unfold. The report suggests that, unless the world’s monolithic education systems can be reformed and rendered more nimble, their failings will come back to haunt future generations’ ability to prosper.

Dev Virahsawmy: “We have failed to adopt the right language policy”

How is our education system preparing our children for the future?

The first question to ask is what do we understand by ‘preparing our children for the future’. Most importantly, they should be able to read and write at least ONE language and if possible, a minimum of TWO languages. In Mauritius, Rodrigues and Agalega less than 30 per cent of the population are literate in at least ONE language; 50 per cent are semi-literate, able to draw or scribble their names and a few random words but unable to write a coherent, grammatically correct sentence; 20 per cent are non-literate.

Why is literacy important and why have we failed?

“A literate community is a dynamic community, one that exchanges ideas and engages in debate. Illiteracy, however, is an obstacle to a better quality of life, and can even breed exclusion and violence (UNESCO)”. The acquisition of literacy and language learning should not be confused as it is often the case in our country. We may want to learn several languages for different reasons but if we want the learning process to be satisfactory, we must first of all ensure that literacy has been acquired.

How to achieve this?

The UNESCO has always been categorical on this issue. The mother tongue must be used. Research has also shown how mother tongue literacy skills help the development of the brain. It boosts the organisation of the visual cortex; it allows the area of the brain responsible for spoken language to be activated by written sentences; it refines how the brain processes spoken language.

What are the shortcomings of our education system in Mauritius?

The fundamental shortcoming is that we have failed to adopt the right language policy. Most people think that when a child is born their brain is just a blank sheet or a clean slate. There is nothing further from the truth than this. Besides genetic endowments, the foetus-child is exposed to loads of information coming from both inside and outside the womb. Richard Berengarten writes in Imagems 2: “The developing human foetus is bombarded constantly by multiple sounds from its environment, the all-encompassing body of the mother…” In Mauritius, the general trend is to ignore all this and parents, teachers and society think that they have the right to write anything they want on the blank sheet or clean slate and are not aware of the damage done to the child’s brain. A good example is our attitude to language. Mauritius is the only place in the world where children are forced to learn the basics of literacy in Three Foreign Languages at one and the same time while at the same time TOTALLY ignoring the womb language to which the child was exposed. The human ear is the first sensory organ to develop and from four-and-a-half months before birth, the ears of a child are fully functional. In view of this, it is now generally accepted that a child hears in the womb and it already recognises and indeed listens to its mother's voice before and after birth. When we ignore this, we are sowing the seeds of disaster and we do it everyday with gusto. The result is already known. Only 30 per cent of our population master functional literacy. Moreover, the impact of our idiotic language policy has not been fully examined.

According to you, what changes should be brought to our education system so as to enable our children to meet up with future job requirements?

To solve all other problems, let us first solve the language issue.

Surendra Bissoondoyal: “Our education system is totally unsuitable”

According to the Chairman of the Board of the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), our education system is not meeting its intended purpose. “However appropriate it may have been in the past, our education system is totally unsuitable to meet the challenges facing the modern world, be they economic or social. We concentrate mainly on the learning of some academically oriented subjects. This starts at the primary level where the 'instruction' – I won't call it 'education' – is geared towards the CPE exam, based on essentially what are in the prescribed textbooks. The main purpose of our primary education system is to select the top achievers in the prescribed subjects for admission to select secondary schools,” utters Surendra Bissoondoyal.

He argues that children with skills and abilities in other fields than academics are not given the opportunity to grow and shine. “Children who may have aptitudes in other fields are not given the opportunity to develop them. They do not grow up as children who need to develop themselves physically through sports and other physical exercises, intellectually through thinking and not through rote learning, aesthetically through an appreciation of music and art, as well as exposure to the environment in order to preserve it from the ills of high rise buildings, heavy traffic, etc.” He also underlines that “very importantly we are not inculcating in children values that will help them differentiate between good and evil in a world that is becoming hostage to materialism and drug abuse.”

Regarding changes that should be brought to our education system, Surendra Bissoondoyal explains that children need a good general education to allow all the aspects of education to be exposed to a good all round education as indicated above. He highlighted that the new education reform, namely the Nine-Year Continuous Basic Education, will bring many positive aspects. “The purpose of the Nine-Year Continuous Basic Education for all children is precisely to provide such an education without the bogey of the CPE playing havoc with their development. After nine years of this basic education for all, the children will be in a better position – with the help of their teachers and parents – to choose what would be best for them. This is when the world of work starts to act as a guide to channel their aptitudes. Some of them will continue their education as well as skills development in many areas in which there is a great demand, particularly skills needed in the field of construction.” 

He trusts that “many of them will be able to become good mechanics, electricians, plumbers etc., and if they are very good, they will be very much sought after. They may, as Sir Gaetan Duval said in the 1980s, have to keep a diary to attend to all the requests from far and near. In Singapore, 25 per cent of the children go to Institutes of Technical Education to become proficient in these areas. Others will continue their school education for a few years before they will be able to enter the new polytechnics that have been set up to provide an appropriate training for them to become qualified technicians or middle level professionals in different fields. In fact, again in Singapore, 40 per cent of students follow that route, leaving only 25 per cent to complete their HSC/A Levels before being eligible university studies.” 

However, Surendra Bissondoyal is of the opinion that for a small country like Mauritius, it is not easy to plan what the world of work will need in 5 to 10 years time. “But finance has already emerged as one of the pillars of our economy, whilst technology is becoming increasingly important in every aspect of the world of work.”

Dr Michael Atchia: “We need programmes to fulfil the needs of 2030”

Dr Michael Atchia believes that our education system is not preparing our children for the future. “A close look at the Mauritius Institute of Education/Ministry of Education programmes of studies for grades 1 to 9 and the syllabuses of Cambridge for SC and HSC will lead to this conclusion: while some new subjects have been introduced and syllabuses in part upgraded, these programme of studies serve the needs of the 1990s, in some cases of the 1970s. What we need are programmes to prepare youth to fulfil the needs of 2030 (when the 12-year old of 2017 will be a young adult who has just started his professional career). And the needs of 2050 when the same 12-year old will be in the 40-55 age group and has become a CEO, a supervisor, a headmaster, an editor, a head of department, a minister, a medical director, a police inspector, a prisoner, a senior factory worker, a designer, a farmer, most importantly a father or mother caring for the grown up children and for the increasingly long-living aged parents and even grand-parents, etc. The basis and values he/she will need then can and should be acquired in the schooling of today!”

Commenting on emerging fields of study, he says that before talking about academic subjects, we need positive learning environments, which allow students to feel comfortable and confident as learners; trained teacher, devoted to their work, knowing the syllabus, prepared for the lesson at hand and who will devote the entire time to teaching, monitoring and guidance of learners, as well as well equipped open classrooms. Based on his almost 50 years of educational experience in a variety of contexts and countries, he adds, we need BOTH the prospects of the future and the traditional values of the past.

“Looking at the trends and projecting into 2050, we will see a context where IT, electronic communication, is everywhere and in all fields. Anyone left behind in electronics will be like an illiterate and innumerate of today. Imagine not just version 50 of Microsoft (we are now at 10) and iPhone 30 (we are now at 8), but the scores of new systems and equipments which will have been designed and be in operation by 2050! Other areas which will predominate are the biological sciences (we are first and foremost living organisms) and the huge advances that will occur in medicine, agriculture, genetics, biosecurity, conservation of biodiversity (without which somehow the human species cannot survive). Also engineering, in all its aspects in particular electronic engineering, biomedical engineering, environmental engineering; renewable energy production, sustainable manufacturing and construction. And finally, environmental management (a new subject which I created in the 1980s and which is already being offered at SC Level) which would include renewable energy management, freshwater resources management, natural hazard, risk and disaster management, transportation, amongst others.”

Faizal Jeeroburkhan: “Students should be prepared for future jobs”

Education specialist Faizal Jeeroburkhan explains that the world is changing fast with globalisation, climate change, trade liberalisation, knowledge explosion, digital and communication revolution, etc. “Students sitting in our classrooms today will inevitably face a totally different world confronted with environmental, social, economic and technological challenges. They should be prepared for jobs that do not exist yet and for situations that we can hardly imagine at present. Education for these students cannot be realised in the traditional ‘business as usual’ school set up. Apart from learning how to read, to write and to do maths, students should be given the opportunity through the appropriate curriculum and pedagogy to develop intellectual curiosity, critical and creative thinking skills, modern communication skills (to retrieve, assess and use information intelligently), metacognitive skills, problem solving skills, entrepreneurship and leadership skills, research and innovation skill. They should also develop personal values such as integrity, discipline, effort, patience, perseverance, etc. as well as citizenship qualities to enable them to promote patriotism, democracy, good governance, meritocracy, teamwork, etc. and to fight corruption, pollution, drug abuse.”

He argues that to cope with the advances taking place in science and technology including ICT, new subjects such as quantum physics, nano technology, artificial intelligence, and robotics will find their way in the school curriculum. “To cope with the world food, water and energy crisis, new subjects such as bio-farming, sustainable fisheries, aquaculture, apiculture, biotechnology, renewable energy technologies, water management technologies, waste recycling, and ecosystem preservation will be introduced. On the economic and social front, new subjects such as eco-tourism, global business, regional and global economy, ports technology and management, healthy living and healthy lifestyle, values and multicultural education should also form part of the school programmes.”

The Education Specialist states that sophisticated electronic devices will play a crucial role in teaching/learning in schools, at home and other places. “Teachers will be mere facilitators. Textbooks and black boards will be replaced by pen drives, laser discs, tablets, laptops, mobile phones, interactive whiteboards, cable television etc. Classes will be available online via social media such as YouTube or Google Hangout both in real time and archived. If students miss a class, they go to the online class to catch up. Classes will be fully connected to social media. All students will be able to share their screens with others via tools such as Skype, Google, etc. Homework and projects will be submitted online via Dropbox. Students will each have a digital portfolio where they store all of their projects, assessments and notes. All students will have a web-based email account. Schools will have digital bulletin boards. Schools and students will work on a 24/7 basis and absenteeism will not matter anymore. Assessment will be based on digital portfolios and real life approaches. Education will be individualized and students will assume greater responsibility for their learning. Parents, teachers and schools will work as a digital community for the benefit of students.”