The Evolution of Education
Life was extremely simple when I was growing up because
education was quite easy compared to today.
We had real paper books and we had real friends and life was quite
simple as we came in doors when the streetlights came on. In the 80’s you went to school and then you
played sports it was that easy. Ever
since mobile phones came along and the internet revolution happened in the 90’s
it seems that the entire world became information age junkies.
Today we have two-year-old babies who know how to switch on
televisions, set the temperature on the AC and we have toddlers teaching
parents how to load applications onto their mobile devices. It seems that no matter how much information
you throw at today’s youth they just cannot seem to be enough. If you look at the ripple down effect onto
the corporate world, then you will notice that no longer does one need to work
hard and slave over long hours if one has access to technology because they
only need to manage their time and allow technology to have them work smart.
As time moves on and we keep evolving so do the age limits
of your CEO’s. If you contemplate your
childhood and you are a sixties or seventies child you will agree that CEO’s
and business owners were in their early fifties. Today a young college dropout buck with a
hoodie, a laptop and a mobile phone is probably the richest man on earth as
well as the CEO of the largest social media network ever created by working
smart.
Education over the years has been evolving at a rate so fast
that it is beyond one’s comprehension as to what the latest new fad will be as
far as a standard system goes. No longer
do you need to be in a brand name school to get into an IVY league college or
university. No longer does your child
need to get twenty million A stars or ten million lightning bolts to prove to
the world that you are a good parent and your child is not an idiot!
Today colleges look at well-rounded individuals who can do
good with what they will learn (basically people with souls). Having a great report card is one thing but
being a good human being comes from the stuff that you are made of and what
values you were raised with. I work in
the not for profit sector for education and I have seen how children these days
applying for further education are either robots who repeat what they have read
in textbooks like parrots or simply those who just want to achieve the highest
grades without a purpose.
When I was growing up your choices for a career were quite
easy, either you wanted to be a cop, a fireman or be a soldier and if not any
of those then by default you wanted to fill in daddy’s shoes. By the time you reached college all you
wanted to do was decide from your three main choices which were law, medicine
or if your daddy was rich then you went abroad to buy your economics degree.
Today one of the biggest problems that the youth face is
deciding on what career they want to follow.
Their choices are so diverse with specializations that promise you a
wealthy lifestyle that when a college applicant fills out a form they usually
fill in “undecided” as a major.
The
youth of today has become aware that they do not want the hard working
lifestyle that their parents had and if given a choice they would rather get a
degree doing something they enjoy and really be motivated to go to work rather
than get a degree for a career that they will simply not wind up wanting to
emotionally invest in and just punch in the hours to earn a paycheck.
My question to all of you parents who today rely upon a dual
income to run your homes is that are we educating and raising our children
right? I mean we throw all our children
into an education hamster wheel or a rat race to get the highest grades but for
what? The youth today is so aware of
what is going on in this world that they can inwardly digest far larger
quantities of information than you or I did when we were growing up.
Are we raising an army of soulless robots and doing right by
our children by forcing information into them when we should also spend more
time allowing them to reason logic and discover mistakes for themselves in a
controlled environment? I mean is the
type of education we are providing to our children for our inner satisfaction that
we did our jobs as parents or is for the children?
A common problem that a lot of parents have with their
children today is that they feel totally disconnected. This disconnection which parents feel to be
emotional is intellectual if you look at it from the eyes of a child. Parents want to be close to their children
yet the fact is that the generation gap for this generation has widened due to
many factors and one of those being that rather than spend time with your
children throughout the year parents squeeze in a holiday one a year to make up
for time lost earning a living to keep it all going!
My point is that we never stop learning and we need to
ensure we as parents also continue to do so and keep up with this youth that is
evolving at a much faster rate than anyone of us ever will! I guess one of the fail-safe measures is to
change our own lifestyles and ensure that we as invest more time in our homes
and know when to stop living in the bubbles we all do! If you have any ideas or comments they would
be deeply appreciated…
If you have thoughts then please do leave a comment, if you liked
what you read please do share this on social media... If you would like to contact me for a free consultation, please directly email me at - amyn@ghulamalis.com
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