On Education

I am a promoter of constant education. For me, learning was never only a part of school, which ended before summer and started again in autumn. I just continuously do it as part of my life and core values.  I learn from books, online courses, conferences, speeches, meetings and random talks with my friends or other people – and at any time. I learn for and from my work, for and from my extra projects, for myself and for building a better life. I think I can sum it up into learning to understand myself and the world and bring something good to the world.

But education is a controversial word nowadays, related to schooling costs, bad teaching, bad curricula and statistics data. It lost all its empirical meaning, and that’s something that brought forward a lot of people who want to bring change into our education, who want to transform education into something different, something pleasant, something that doesn’t refer only to math, sciences, literature, arts only but to learning how to be kind, to have empathy, understanding, to live at the height of your capacity and never, ever stop learning.

I would like to present below three impressive examples of such actions to change education and especially to change the way we perceive its meaning:

1. Sir Ken Robinson showed in an 18 minutes TED talk that schools kill creativity in children, our current school system is highly flawed and needs immediate change. This is also the man who made me love TED, as his talk was the first I ever watched. He currently works with organizations and the government to find a formula that allows education to turn into what it used to be. Find one of his best talks below:

2. Children Full of Life: the documentary follows teacher Toshiro Kanamori in a 4th grade (9 – 10 years old) class in a primary school in Kanazawa, NW of Tokyo. I accidentally ran into this documentary some years ago, but I must admit that it brought me to tears (I can’t resist the little kids crying), and it amazed me. The genius Mr Kanamori teaches the kids about empathy, understanding each other, being happy, caring and supporting each other, incredibly important qualities in life that our schools at the moment leave out for some reason. There was only one question going through my head while watching this (3 times already): Why don’t we do this ALL THE TIME?

3. edX, KhanAcademy, Coursera: these websites with (relatively) free courses from the best universities in the world opened the door to a whole new world for me. Online education collects data on learning that is constantly used to improve the learning experience for students. All universities should share their online courses openly to the world. Might this be the future of education?