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- Education In A VUCA World
Couple of months ago, I came across 'Rethinking School And How Children Grow Up' on YouTube. This issue is a compilation of great quotes by Dana Mortenson, co-founder of World Savvy, during that panel discussion.
Many of the points Dana raised are absolutely spot on, in particular the idea that the raison d'être of school is to help kids make their way in the world.
School shouldn't be something you get through.
It should be something that affirms who you are, helps to build a world view that sets you on a path to thrive in whatever way is meaningful to you.
We're not preparing students for a standardised world.
A lot of the ways we used to built our education system was to respond to an industrial era that doesn't exist anymore.
Inquiry-based and project-based models to connect what’s happening in their lives to what they’re learning in the classroom.
What are we preparing young people for in school?
A world where these challenges are interconnected, interdependent, super complex, super nuanced, and we can’t solve them by ourselves.
It’s an opportunity to look at K12 and think about how we’re building those competencies in a way that helps all kids be ready for that kind of discourse and that kind of problem solving.
Rote memorisation is certainly not going to get you there.
Flexibility and adaptability and the ability to live in ambiguity, uncertainty and change…. and figure out how to navigate that… is antithetical to how school was set up where there’s a right answer and a wrong answer.
In a VUCA world full of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, our children need to learn to be adaptable. They need to be skilled in critical thinking, communicating and collaborative problem-solving. They need to put more faith in their creativity and imagination than the knowledge passed on from teachers.
What Dana makes clear is the fact that schools are not equipped to help our kids develop skills that will allow them to thrive. There is too much rote learning. As parents, we have to play an active role in helping our kids build skills. At Doyobi, we call it skill-building through collaborative problem-solving in the metaverse. I'm hosting a parent webinar tomorrow Sunday 10 Apr at 2pm SGT to share about the skills kids need to make their way in the world, and what we can do as parents to help them develop these skills.