If today’s industry no longer need hundreds of thousands of employees/labourers, why does schools keep on training people to be employees/labourers?
If the new economy needs people who can think, create, innovate and invent changes, why do the education system/curriculum keep on training us on how to obey instructions?
I may be wrong, but I think I have a point.
Originally, from research, education was designed to make students independent, vibrant and creators of their desired lives, until in the 19th Century when we entered the industrial age. This is what happened... Human beings finally discovered how to produce things with machines. Mass productions of everything were getting started. Several industries were springing up and they needed thousands and hundreds of thousands of people to work on their factories.
There was a sudden need for the rich to train the poor on how to work in their factories and be paid “handsomely” for doing so. That was a problem and the solution was simple... “Let’s design an educational system that will train people on how to work in the factories. “That was what gave birth to our present educational system.
Fast forward, about two Centuries after the industrial revolution, we’ve entered another age, the age of creativity and innovation, the age of computers, the age of automation, the age of artificial intelligence.
About two Centuries ago, we needed hundreds of thousands of people to operate our companies and economy, so it did make sense to teach our people how to be employees. Today, the world have invented thousands of technologies and is still eagerly in quest of more technologies that help/will help us to run our companies, does it still make sense to equip us with tools that are obsolete and information/knowledge of the 19th Century? Does it still make sense to train us for jobs when there are absolutely no jobs?
Wait! Let’s even take a moment to find out the meaning of the word “education”. The dictionary in my phone defines education as the act or process of acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself. Education is about knowledge, but not just that, education is about developing the powers within your mind, not just that, education is about preparing for the future.
If schools claims to be giving education, which means to prepare us for the future, then, they need to rise above these present status and prepare us fully for the future. We can't keep on wallowing and swimming in the past style and expect to be ready for the future. No! We need to call a spade a spade.
What we are witnessing today is like a mother wanting to teach her daughter to be physically defensive in the face of a perceived civil war and start teaching her on how to use arrows and swords (in the 21st Century).
Knowing how to fight with arrows and swords was a great thing in the 14th and 15th Century. Knowing how to fight with swords or arrows is progressively useless in the 21st Century. If you want to fight today, the least weapon you can learn how to use are rifles.
I hope that our education system/curriculum be reviewed, else, we are on a long thing.
We need a 'maker' education system/curriculum and not a 'user' one.
The clock is ticking fast, may God help my country Nigeria
By
Yakubu Hamza