Schoolchildren in the developing world may be better equipped for the demands of the 21st century than their European and American counterparts, because they are adapting faster to changing needs, a new report says. The report, from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), sounds a new alarm for educators charged with ensuring their students are prepared to compete in the new global economy. (OECD)
eSchool News online – OECD sounds new education alarm
I began to see this in the 1990s, when I attended a number of iEARN conferences. I was so impressed with directions that schools were taking, not in England or France, but in the developing world. I realized then that these countries had a huge and perhaps insurmountable advantage over us in the industrial world. They were doing all of this from scratch. They were inventing their education systems, for the most part, for the first time. They were looking at their world, their current state of readiness to become a cooperative (and competitive) partner in that world, and inventing education systems that would help them to become world-ready.
In the industrial world, our education system has been so successful for so long, and it has become so ingrained in our sense of cultural expectation and entitlement, and there is so much momentum behind our antique industry-based system that we may well not be able to turn it around in time. We are so well educated, that education has become the goal, not world-readiness. It’s why we spend so much time and effort teaching our students to be good students, instead of paying attention to a rapidly changing world and adapting how and what we teach to prepare our children to prosper in a rapidly changing world.
The quote above comes from an eSchool News story on a recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Education at a Glance, “…covers 30 of the world’s richest nations, but it also compares how they stack up with key non-OECD members China and India.” It points to a number of indicators that at least these two developing countries are adapting more easily to (changing) conditions in the 21st century. Among indications reported by eSchool News…
Among OECD members, East Asian countries are increasingly outperforming Europe and the United States–and they “succeed without leaving many students behind,”
Other countries show a marked contrast between high achievers and their struggling peers. More than a quarter of 15-year-olds in the United States, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, and Turkey performed at or below the lowest levels on math–and students from poor families were 3.5 times more likely to do badly.
The report also warned about increasing costs of dropping out of high school (see related story).
Adults who do not finish high school in the U.S. earn 65 percent of what people make if they do finish high school. No other country had such a severe income gap. Countries such as Finland, Belgium, Germany, and Sweden have the smallest gaps.
Personally, I do not believe that it is too late, because I suspect that no one is getting it right, just yet. The measures used to compare China and India with us are still tied to a traditional sense of being educated.
Now this is just one lowly educator, but I suspect that what will emerge as the adaptive partner of a rapidly changing, information driven, technology-rich world — the world-ready citizen — will not be so much the one who has received the most advanced degree, and perform the deepest calculus, or can debug a condensed microprocessor. It will be the person who can innovate. It will be the person who can observe, invent, and who as the skills to resourcefully use his information environment to learn what he needs to know to do what he needs to do.
I’ve said all of this before. But I suspect that I’ll keep saying it, until we have decided to relax, free and empower our teachers and students, step outside of the box, and had faith in our own ability to joyfully innovate.
Finally, the eSchool News story closed with…
The U.S. government spends more per student from elementary school through college–$12,023–than all countries except Switzerland.
I would like to understand this better. Perhaps llarry will help. But I suspect that much of that is paying for our efforts to be democratic in our education, and I know that democracy costs. I’m not saying that we have done this well and the discrepancy between high achievers and low achievers and the abysmal dropout rate in my country indicates that we’re doing things wrong. But I think that we should be WILLING to pay what ever it costs to do this thing right. It’s our future, not just our children’s future.
“OECD Sounds New Education Alarm.” eSchool News Online 14 Sep 2006 16 Sep 2006 <http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=6584>
technorati tags:warlick, education, oecd
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I’ve been travelling around SE Asia recently for my job with UNESCO. I think the report sounds a little optimistic. In many countries, education is still in a dire situation, particularly those where corruption and political problems impact on the education system. In places like Lao and Myanmar, there are so many children in a classroom, and teachers lack qualifications in the subjects they teach. The children are often learning by heart, reciting words as a class, rather than acquiring analytical skills. However, despite this difficult situation, many of the pupils are encouraging. In Lao, some children were very competent in English and used Internet extensively. Meanwhile, the teachers were very nervous with technology, and unwilling to move from a teacher-centred to student-centred model. Tricky for the students to deal with maybe, but it does show there is a lot of hope for the future.
I’m with Alexa. Like Alexa, although my experience is with Africa. With my own eyes I have seen kids packed two to a one-person desk, trying to learn without access to materials or qualified teachers. I have seen schools where there is no electricity, let alone computers. I was involved with a feeding scheme at a school where the children had to be given both breakfast and lunch, because the parents lacked the wherewithal to provide this (and for many of them, it would be all they got to eat each day), and then the children themselves would clean the school before lessons could start. And these cases are not the exception. In fact, my guess is that there are probably far more children in these deprived situations than there are in the well provisioned schools that our own children attend. Try as I might, I don’t see the flat world. I see a plateau, yes, but I see very steep sides leading up to that plateau.
While we are debating the future of education at the leading edge, the trailing edge is getting left further and further behind.
Sorry – soapbox moment. I have them from time to time!
This is what bothers me about Flattism, that it implies very much what I wrote about above, that the world is doing things right, while we, in the West are floundering. It’s a useful argument from the Amero-centric and Western perspective — from which I usually write. But the truth of it is that these flattist conversations almost always example India and China, neither of which are particularly flat.
To be fair, Freedman, admits and laments that the world is not flat. But the globalist side of me knows that until we are truly flat, we will continue to have hunger, ignorance, violence, war, and terrorism.
This could be a very happy place.