Making right what is wrong in schools

Salaam and Greetings to All,

Before the Hair Raya break, I read a similar thing mentioned by the Chairman of Google on the challenges faced by UK education system. You can read the article here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/26/eric-schmidt-chairman-google-education. And I believe, Malaysia is not spared from that challenges too. 

As a learning & development person, I am always faced with the challenges of raising demands by bosses on the lack of knowledge, and competencies by employees. These group of employees I roughly figured are around the mid 30s and below age group. They are the product of our ever changing education system.

Being a former teacher and lecturer I learned that our education system is so content driven. Yet, the work place requires process driven knowledge, such as thinking skills, creative thinking, problem solving, communication skills, writing skills, making connections etc. There is clearly a disjoint between the two.

How can we resolve this? I doubt we are in a position to change the education system. And if we are, I doubt it can happen even next 2 – 3 years. While the ‘debate’ goes on, our current and future workforce is becoming more and more handicapped. But, is the situation hopeless? Should we leave it to the hand of fate to solve, which is in essence, our problem too?

I believe in “the good one person can do”. We may not be able to change the world. But, we can change the little bit of things here and there. We may not be able to fix the education system. But we can develop a learning and developmental system to complement and supplement the current system. What am I talking about?

A few things we can do:

• Adopt a school or a university.
• Pros – providing them the knowledge and experience of the corporate to the teaching staff and students. Creating a feedback to the curriculum.
• Cons – schools have other masters and stakeholders to answer to. They might think they are being intruded and the “ego” factor might interfere with good judgment.
• Creating a complementary program
• For schools / universities. Creating programs that could supplement and complement the current curriculum. Unfortunately, our education system is a silo system. Even the teachers teach in silo. Can’t blame them. They are the product of the system. Programs like reading and writing in the content areas. Authenticity Learning. Problem Based Learning. Sharing what is used in organizations for schools and universities to emulate.
• Pros – since this does not interfere with the current curriculum, program does not require higher authority approvals. More of marketing and selling the programs.
• Cons – added cost that students may not be able to pay for. Students may not see the importance because they don’t get credits for graduation.
• For businesses. Creating a conversion program for fresh graduates. Something similar to what we currently have as management trainee. However, there is a slight difference. Management trainee programs tend to look at their academic background and organizations try to fit them accordingly. Conversion programs – these graduates are taken is as clean slate. Tabular rasa. There is a period of learning and developmental program converting them from whatever their background is, into what we want them to be. Quite a number of MNCs have already done this for many years. One of them is Schlumberger. They never hire people with more than one year’s work experience. The Armed Forces is another example.
• Pros – low cost labor. No commitment for both parties. Companies get the kind of people they want. They are trained and molded into the image you want it to be.
• Cons – High initial cost for the conversion program. Success factor is not only on the program but the whole organization in attracting and recognizing their people too.
• Staff / Executive / Management / Leadership Developmental programs. Organizations need to convert / change / modify the learning and behaviors our workforce have. The silo, Do as I am told, Master – Servant and many other negatives mindsets we carried from schools and universities. To do this, organizations need to develop programs and create the eco system within the organizations to allow them to develop and utilize those learning.
• Pros – research has shown many times over for many years, one of the reasons employees stay is the opportunity to develop themselves and be able to make meaningful contribution to the company.
• Cons – expensive and you may get create a bunch of smart people that will begin to question the authority and decisions of their managers. This may not necessarily be a bad thing. It forces the managers to improve and be better.

Have a happy raya. And Yes, the open houses over the weekend will mean more eating.

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Regards,

Iskandar

From: FeedBlitz [mailto:feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com] On Behalf Of Seth Godin
Sent: Monday, September 05, 2011 6:25 PM
To: iskandar
Subject: Seth's Blog : Back to (the wrong) school

Back to (the wrong) school

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.

Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work--they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.

Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence--it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.

Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.

Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of worker who are trained to do 1925 labor.

The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they're told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you're capable of getting there.

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?