Continuing on my previous post about this subject, I would like to share some more opinions on the matter.

Recently, the Belgian competition for the Young Vision Award 2011 came to a conclusion. This competition is organized by pwc and “De Tijd” and is aimed at young students between 18 and 27 years old. They are asked to write down their opinion on any matter in the future society and/or economy in an essay, which will be judged by professionals. The “best” (most interesting, substantiated or enticing) papers are made public on the website and are rewarded. A brilliant initiative, as it encourages young people to think about the main issues in society and give their view on how it should evolve.

The winner this year is Arne Van Acker, an 18 year old student of Informatics. In his paper, he calls for a more innovative educational system in Belgium and Europe. His text is in Dutch, but he quotes the following main problems:

• Education today is focused on reproduction, rather than learning. Interaction, creativity and exploration is, to put it at its mildest, not encouraged.
• Teachers are not encouraged to perform better or in any way change their teaching methods to fit current societal changes. Their wages are fixed, their job guaranteed.
• There are barriers between the different types of education (technical, professional, general,etc.). There is no cooperation between the different schools, even though all these competences have to come together in the society and economy.
• Modern technology is not used enough in schools.
• Schools do not address societal issues like caring for the environment enough. Incredible amounts of paper and energy is still wasted in the day-to-day activities.

To address these problems, he offers the following solutions for debate:

• Education should mean that the same information is personalized, i.e. brought to different students in different ways. Some students can learn theory and apply it afterwards, other students learn theories better through practice.
• Encouraging interaction between the different students should be made a priority. This includes letting the “smarter” students explain the subject to their fellow students, but also to allow students of different types of schools to come and work together, for example in a group project.
• Teachers should have a supporting function, guiding the students in their education, rather than telling them what they should be able to reproduce. It should also be made possible to reward teachers that perform well and punish those that do not.
• Modern technology must be used more. Not only is this more effective for the current and future generations, but it will also  greatly reduce the amount of paper needed, the weight of the backpacks and the cost to update the teaching material. It will also improve the possible interactions between students, teachers and the school in general.

An interesting and well-written opinion! The Young Vision Award was awarded to the right paper! Congratulations!

It just so happens I have my own opinion on the matter. In some areas it coincides with the above bulletins. I for example completely agree that interaction between students and the use of modern technology should be encouraged more in schools. On other points, such as the more passive role of the teachers, I have my doubts. And lastly, I distinguish another core problem to the current educational system that is not addressed in this paper: the limited choice, or lack thereof, in the subjects that students wish to be educated and the focus on diplomas or certificates instead of competences.

In this situation, the way students of all ages are educated is quite similar: there is a limited set of study programmes that consist out of a fixed set of courses, which someone else has deemed important for them. Students have to complete all these courses if they want to achieve the much needed certificate/diploma. In many cases, students fail their studies because they fail one or several courses that are uninteresting to or sometimes irrelevant for them. And even if they pass, the time they spent studying the course is wasted as they forget almost everything soon after the exam.

Though this system provides some form of conformity, a standard on which future employers can rely, often it is the “extra features”, beside the standard programme, that really add value to a CV. Furthermore, offering the same standard programme to every student is easier to manage (and therefore cheaper), but it is much harder to help struggling students individually. In a “caring society” like ours, solving this problem ought to be more important than maintaining an easy-to-manage solution.

Even though I can see the value of a diploma, which ensures that everyone that has earned it has (or is ought to have) the same competences, I think the focal point must be the talents and the interests of the student itself, which are at the basis of the acquired competences. A different system for earning a diploma is needed with more freedom to choose the subjects in which you want to be educated. Rather than give an unchangeable programme of several years, offer a smaller basis and let the students choose the rest. Let them discover for themselves what their talents and interests are and let them choose the courses that are relevant to them. Or let them put together their own certificate, with or without a title, which details the competences they have (and which are more likely to actually interest them).

Currently, this is already done in higher education, albeit on a often small scale. At my university it is for example possible to follow several courses through a “credit contract”, for which you receive credits. And in my programme it is possible to choose a few courses for yourself, though both the choice in and the amount of courses you can take is very limited. In earlier education, I have never experienced this choice.

This is, as always, only an opinion though. I have not detailed it in a business case or substantiated it with facts and figures. I do not know how feasible this is, at least on the short term. But it must be looked into. In Arne’s paper, he sums it up very well why:

Belgium, Europe even, does not have the natural resources, low-cost labour or an optimal tax climate to attract businesses. We only have a knowledge economy to sustain our economy. If the education does not evolve with the changing demands, we will lose that last advantage as well.

The text by Arne Van Acker can be found here (Dutch).