IMAGINE a faith-based school with spiritual and emotional intelligent students who are multilingual, articulate, nimble in coding, proficient in User Experience design and are strong in recalling skills.
Living in the 21st century is both frightening and exciting. We are living in a world where there is no certainty. Just think about this: we invest a lot of money to send our children to a medical school and yet, there is no guarantee that they might even end up being a doctor due to the stiff competition of training contracts.
Then there is that perpetual “change” aka restructuring removing all notion of jobs for life.
Once, the oil and gas sector was so hot that it attached a ringgit sign as a prefix to the names of its workforce. This person smells of black gold. Now, that person could be on some banks’ blacklists to get a financial loan after oil prices slid to the ditch in a swoosh.
Looking at the attributes of the 21st century side-by-side with our existing education system, we then need to ask: is it fit for purpose to enable us and our children to be adaptive, multi-skilled and extremely nimble?
If I were an accountant now, and will be made redundant tomorrow, can I switch jobs to be a data scientist or digital marketeer in a short time? How do I invest in my children’s education that will enable them to be ready to enter into the job market, either by setting up their own enterprises or getting employed by organisations within 12 months instead of 48 months?
How do I educate my children to learn the holy book by heart, its jurisprudence and master jujitsu negotiation skills at the same time?
Can they be a full stack developer as well?
For me, our education system of the 21st century must match the eccentricity, speed and flexibility of the era. There is very little point of shouting “be creative and adaptive” when we carved our education system out of a tablet of stone with steel structure curriculum.
Over the years we have also piled up the system with dated policies, procedures, processes and practice that keep turning the system into a humongous web of confusion and complexity.
Tinkering with nooks and corners will not be adequate. We need to overhaul it by first drawing a picture of the kind of education system that is fit for the 21st century world.
But, how do we reimagine our education system of the 21st century? Three things need to happen:
Understand the attributes of the 21st century world, understand our own aspirations as a country and aligning the education system to match those aspirations point by point.
And it is so easy to misalign.
How well the “new” education system we present to the public depends on who reimagines it, who is allowed to reimagine it and who sits around the reimagining table ― how conventional or unconventional are they? How bold are they? How well can they inject diversity, affordability and sustainability into the system?
Who executes the plan of action? What kind of monitoring and learning system are we going to put in place to prevent misalignment from the aspirations and principles that we set out in the early stage? (The list is, of course, not exhaustive).
As a learning designer, the essence of the 21st century education system is borderless.
Borderless does not only limit to geographical borders. It also means borderless to children regardless their background, age and ethnicity as well contents, methods, platforms, process and tools.
And the very nature of borderless education is eccentricities, injecting elements of play (activating happy and resilient chemicals in the brain — endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin), cooperation, networking and fun.
These are tactile tools to get children excited about learning. They can help make STEM subjects, often regard as “’difficult subjects”, to be more approachable to them. Imagine children from tahfiz schools reliving historical contents of Ibn Batuta travel or resurrecting the momentous debates between Al-Ghazali and Avicenna through virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality technology. They will learn how these extremely articulate scholars mastered both the Quran and mathematics.
They can visit places using Google Cardboard to access 360-degree videos of the Grand Canyon.
Similarly, children in Keningau and Dungun can collaborate in an open forum to solve physics problems using WhatsApp group and share their learning on YouTube.
It will be fascinating to see if children all over the country can get together to translate learning materials together, replicating Viki.com ― one line at the time.
What about examinations? Debates of examinations or no examinations are fruitless.
Examinations, for years, have been a nightmare to children, parents, teachers and schools alike. Examinations imprison children and annihilate their creativity and imagination.
Borderless education, on the other hand, eradicates the draconian nature of examinations by using real-time assessments. Children are assessed as they play, not for the coveted badge of, “Hey, I’m a genius”, but to check the obstacles they may face in their learning.
Are these possible scenarios a fantasy? Can we really do these things? Are they too good to be true? Yes, we can do it but only if we are bold and eccentric enough to embrace the philosophy of borderless education so that our children can learn to be resilient, creative and wise.
Suziana Shukor is a Learning Services Leader (Digital), working at a joint venture company between the UK Cabinet Office and one of Europe’s largest digital company