The Evolution of Education

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…

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