If I could change anything in today’s education system, I’d reshape the focus of the essential basic skills. It’s a very complicated issue to address. Anyway, I’ll try to share my two cents.
I have noticed that plenty of time and resources being wasted in today’s educational practices. Teachers struggle to meet the demands of testing and assessments. In addition, there are many different focuses (including special education, technology enhancements, bilingual education, environmental education, multicultural education, anti-bullying education, character education, etc.) that may all be deemed as important. However, the results of today’s education are hard to assess. Our students’ academic achievements were outperformed by students from Asia and Europe. We have spent much effort to nurture our students. However, we have a great majority students showing lack of incentives in learning. For those students who work hard all the way to get into a good college, they still struggle to find a good direction for their future. Young college students today are mostly concerned if they are able to find a job after they graduate and use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in college.
I was wondering what kinds of students we should develop. I love to imagine that we can produce many good people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. (Ironically, both of them dropped out of the colleges.) They were smart, creative, focused, passionate, determined, proactive, perseverent, and visionary. They were sensitive to other people’s needs and they disciplined themselves well. They were very positively influential to our society. To translate the qualities and characteristics of these successful people into educational focuses, I have come up with some ideas for the essential basic skills that all students need to have to excel:
- Literacy skills: read, write, listen, speak
- Processing information: acquire intelligence and wisdom from various sources
- Meta-cognition: learning how to learn
- Communication and social skills: understand others and let others understand us
- Collaboration, sharing, turn-taking, contribution to good efforts or projects
- Goal setting and planning; actions and determination to bring tasks through to success
- Reasoning and judgment: Students need to be able to use their intellect to estimate, measure, calculate, analyze and problem solve. Prioritize information. Apply key information to yield the best results.
- Self-reflection for constant improvements
The current education system has touched upon some of the above aspects. I strongly believe that we need to focus on these items in order to develop good students and good workers in the future.
