Future Of Education: Part II
The Reinvention of Lifelong Learning
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Education is not the filling of the pail but the lighting of a fire — William Butler Yeats
Education is a process that goes on ’til death. The moment you see someone who knows she has found the one true way, and can call all the others false, then you know you’re in the company of an ignoramus — Maya Angelou
This article explores human ingenuity in designing alternate content and delivery mechanisms to surmount obstacles such as poor infrastructure, lack of teachers and technologies that are pushing the current state of the art further than our imagination.
Alternative Models of Education
An alternative school is an educational establishment with a curriculum and methods that are nontraditional. Such schools offer a wide range of philosophies and teaching methods; some have strong political, scholarly, or philosophical orientations, while others are more ad hoc assemblies of teachers and students dissatisfied with some aspect of mainstream or traditional education (source:wikipedia)
The world has been active in developing alternate models of education with mixed results. Although Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) and MOOC platforms have proliferated to support lifelong learning, their acceptability by companies that still rely on the existing formal education system to fulfill requirements is questionable.
One might argue that the world of the future will not look anything like it is today. By that token, the current content and delivery methods are outdated. That is true. However, unless you test someone through an experiential learning experience, it is hard to judge capability. If we imagine a scenario where Universal Basic Income (UBI) becomes the norm, it becomes a different discussion altogether.
A look at the development of various alternative forms of education may provide clues to uniting disparate attempts into a common, acceptable form of education.
