Human, an intellectual creature on this planet gives an apex level importance to education and why shouldn't we, education taps the intellectual potential. It spurs innovation and discovery. Through education, knowledge can be enhanced and it's like a seed sowed in soil, when the seed receive enough sunlight, water and air, it grows and becomes a big tree which afterwards becomes beneficial for others. Basic education has been made compulsory and government funded in many countries. The education medium across the globe and as of today is largely centered around the classroom, a room typically part of an institution where teachers teach and learners learn. When and where did all this start? Though much more can be written on the topic, I will keep it short and precise.
In 19th century Prussia a German state, that no longer exists, introduced the modern notion of a compulsory public funded education. The idea was that education is essential for each and every citizen of the country, sounds good right? yes but there was a fundamental flaw. The Prussian model of education at its core was implemented to create conforming citizens, the type of citizens who would abide by the King's law even if logic tells them to do otherwise. This should make sense from the Kings perspective. Prussian king trained troops were out powered by Napoleon's relatively amateur men. King's humiliating loss at the Battle of Jena gave birth to a national uprising known as the Prussian Reform. Salient feature of which was the Prussian education system. Prussian scholars philosophers and the King then came up with a model of compulsory public schooling to suppress individual thought and create national conformity. A key influence in shaping this model philosopher Johann Fichte wrote,
Free will in the pupil is the first mistake of the old system and also if you want to influence the student at all you must do more than merely talk to him, you must fashion him and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise then you wish him to will. Ref
Prussian model produced people who can read and write very well however homogeneity is certainly not what we want with a modern education system after all we want our people to be driven by logic and reason not irrationality and conformity. Although our intent has changed some elements of the Prussian system but there are still some which are are naturally inherited in today's classrooms. An example would be linearity in multiple forms e.g. all information shall flow from the teacher to the student the teacher shall preach and the student shall absorb. The syllabus shall also move in a linear fashion and so shall the grades. This indeed is identical to the concept of monarchy, coincidence? The Prussian model took shape in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries which was roughly the same time period that witnessed the dawn of the Industrial Revolution therefore industries also started shaping the schools hence a bell would ring and after some time children were sorted according to their dates of manufacture, they would move through classes as though moving through an assembly line and they would have to go through a quality test at the end of the production cycle which would label them as pass or fail.
We need people capable of creating intelligent assembly lines, all of the history we looked at, strongly indicates that we need to rethink the way we educate. The exponential growth of online education in the past decade or so has blown people's mind.
MOOCs acronym for massive open online courses have enabled the best of professors from the best of universities even Nobel laureates to teach students all over the globe. Youtube and online video courses have given a new dimension to educational content, probably is no exaggeration to say that all these platforms have revolutionized teaching. Videos, interactive exercises, animations, demonstrations have augmented teaching.
The current online educational scenario has revolutionized the way we convey and to a larger extent the way we teach but little if anything has been done for and from the side of the learner I think the way we re imagine education is that we reinvent the learning process we have to realize that learners are not passive conformers but instead are active discoverers. The system has to recognize that everybody is a teacher and a learner. Teaching is the best manifestation of learning, switching to this mindset will foster a student-teacher, student-student and even a student-technology collaboration which will be best for the future of Education.
