1. Introduction
I’m often asked what “education” is
and what it means to me. The answer is as follows: Education is everything you
do when you aren’t doing something else. Education means continually learning
new things so that you don’t have to constantly relearn the same things over
and over again. Education is about making good decisions for yourself and your
life, about finding meaning in the world, about being a better version of
yourself.
Education is not just about
memorizing facts, learning languages, or understanding abstract concepts.
Education is not just about passing tests or getting degrees from schools.
Education is also about developing skills, knowledge, and values and using them
to live a meaningful life.
Education doesn’t end at school either. It doesn’t even end one day after school either; it continues at work, in our leisure time (during which we read books), and in our relationships with our families and friends (which teach us more about ourselves).
2. What is Education?
A lot of people have heard the term
“education” and often associate it with schools. While schools certainly play a
large role in shaping our education, they are not the only way we learn. We
learn by reading, watching, listening, and interacting with things around us.
In this post on Hacker News (or HN), Mark Zuckerberg shares his thoughts on education and its scope:
“Scaling is hard, and we must understand why. For example, one way to put it is: It's easy to solve
most problems solvable by machines. But solving for many problems
that aren't solvable by machines is hard.”
This post is worth reading because
it summarizes an important point about how “scaling” — or, more broadly
speaking, “learning” — can be a two-way street between humans and machines.
Text: In this post, Paul Graham
presents his views on learning as a process:
“Learning is like flying a plane;
you have to go through all the motions of flying before you know how to fly —
which is a good analogy for learning anything else. Before I learned how to
drive my bike I'd never even been in my driveway before! Maybe if I'd tried
just learning how to drive my bike when I was 27 I would've been better at
flying than now, but driving wasn't fun enough of a problem so I accepted the
fact that learning how to drive was going to be harder than learning how to fly
(which was fun). So instead of trying to fix the problem later by learning more
about flying one day when I was older, I just needed to practice over and over
again until I got it right...The lesson here isn't so much me memorizing
certain skills as me practicing enough times until they become automatic."
3. The Role of Teachers and Educators in the Education System
In the past, a teacher was a person who taught. But today teachers are not just people who teach. They are not just people who talk on the phone or write on paper. Today’s teachers have many responsibilities and there is no single definition of what it means to be a teacher. There is no single definition of what it means to be an educator either.
What we do know is that educators
need to make learning easier, more engaging, and enjoyable for the students they
teach, to prevent them from slipping through the cracks, failing their
courses, and dropping out of school altogether; that they need to ensure their
students are ready to compete in today’s information economy; and that they
need to focus on improving teaching methods so that students can learn more
effectively and get more out of their education experience.
The most glaring problem with
education today is that it often features only one side: the teacher being
blamed for student failure (#1). This is an old problem: the “one size fits
all” solution has been tried for decades (and failed). We see this problem
everywhere we look: schools ostensibly have good intentions but fail in one
area after another (e.g., funding, technology, curriculum). In essence, schools
should be tasked with finding ways to help students succeed despite problems
with funding or technology, rather than trying to fix them (or worse).
The other problem is that much of what we have learned about teaching runs contrary to our traditional notion of education as preparation for a professional career. If you want your child to succeed in life expect him/her to work hard! If you want your child not to drop out of school expect him/her not merely to pass their classes but also think critically and critically assess the information they may encounter before making decisions based on incomplete information (e.g., when voting), rather than accepting the status quo as “good enough” (e.g., when deciding whether or not a product should be produced), or being too influenced by peers’ opinions (#2).
4. Key Aspects of a Good Teacher
Education provides the means of knowing
and understanding the world through learning, acquiring information, and living
a life based on knowledge, skills, and values.
Self-education is an important part
of education that expands one’s ability to express oneself and to think
critically about what one reads or hears.
Text: We have a problem with many
people who don’t read the last sentence of their email messages; they are just
dismissing it as too fluffy for them to take seriously. If you are one of them
(or if you have friends like this), there is some good news for you as well:
you only need to break off that habit once in your life. How? By using your
smartphone! Most people reply to emails with their smartphone — but they don’t
usually read them! Some even leave it plugged into their desk overnight without
ever looking at it!
If you can discourage your friends from doing the same (and if you give them any extra time on their phone), this will make your inbox much more productive — which means they will read more words in future messages! And if they do read something on their phone, you can use this knowledge as an opportunity to ask questions directly in a text message (so that you can also double-check some things about what has been said).
5. Other Roles in the Education System
The biggest thing that many people
are struggling with is education. Education is a big issue and has been for
centuries. The primary questions to be asked about education today are:
• Does the system work?
• Do students learn in a way that is useful to them?
• Does the quality of education vary
from place to place?
• Are there inequalities in the
distribution of knowledge between people and places?
It’s not just a question of whether
it works or not, but whether it works in the way we think it should. There is a
lot of debate around these questions and they really haven’t changed much over
time. We have more to say here than most other posts, so we won’t get too into
that. But we would like to explore some of the ways that more modern issues
overlap with old ones (and new ones) and discuss some of the problems we have
seen over time as well as ways to improve things (or avoid them).
6. How to Improve our Education System
EdX has developed into a global
network of “learners” who use its platform to access more than 1 million hours
of video lecture content each month. The platform also offers over 3 years' worth of free online textbooks from leading universities from around the world.
The largest online education
marketplace in the world, Coursera is an online learning platform that offers
introductory courses in many different subjects. Coursera provides a wide
variety of courses for beginners and intermediate students as well as graduate
and advanced training for professionals too!
Coursera was founded in 2008 by
Andrew Ng (who was then affiliated with Stanford). It was initially created to
teach machine learning algorithms to Stanford students (from 2003 to 2008)
using Java as its programming language.
In May 2016, Accelerated Education
announced its acquisition by Netscape Ventures (under which it will continue
being operated as part of Mozilla). Netscape Ventures supports education
technology startups through its investment arm, the Internet Venture Fund,
which has invested in Coursera through Netscape Ventures since 2011.
The company is based in Mountain
View, California but has offices across Europe and Asia where they serve
customers worldwide through their partners including university campuses and
government agencies.
By: Nasram Naseem
The writer is a pro-active teacher at Ruzhn English Language Center
Bugh Meeri Turbat Kech, Balochistan
0 Comments
Post a Comment