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To get a proper education we must look outside the classic classroom

Friday September 18 2020
class

The Internet has produced a new crop of teachers who have captured the minds of young people. PHOTO | FILE

By WALE AKINYEMI

We must not let our schooling interfere with our education. However, when we look carefully at global trends, we observe that this is what has been happening.

Compare and contrast the phone or gadgets of the past with those of today. There has been a total transformation.

Yet when you compare the classroom of the past with that of today, there has been no change. It is still the same model where you have a know-it-all teacher in front of students who are graded on the basis of their memory of what has been taught and not on an understanding of ideas. School has rewarded memory over intelligence for years.

Albert Einstein sad that knowledge is limited but imagination embraces the whole world. Therein lies our problem. We are so steeped in logical patterns that the greatest innovators had to pull themselves out of classrooms.

Disruption

A people who have been conditioned to conform cannot suddenly become disruptors, and they will not survive in a world shaped by disruption. There should be classes on M-Pesa in Kenyan schools to inspire and show youth what can be done. BRCK, Ushahidi, Africa’s Talking and other Kenyan innovations are celebrated globally. Why are we not teaching about these innovations in our schools?

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Again, the classroom environment promotes individualistic people who are told that you win only when others lose. Yet we want them to come out to a world where collaboration and win-win is the driving force. If the school curriculum won’t do it, then mentors should create forums to inspire and impart knowledge. This is why we have established the Street University. The cycle of our success is complete only when we have raised others to do what we do, and then to do it better than us.

The best leadership is one in which leaders work to make themselves operationally irrelevant. And, as I have found out in my business and life, when you do that you will never become irrelevant.

There would never have been a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs without a foundation laid by people like Thomas J Watson of IBM. And there would never have been a Thomas J Watson without the founder of IBM, Charles Flint.

The environment in which we live today has many teachers. The Internet has produced a new crop of teachers who have captured the minds of young people. Some have millions of followers and the youth are hanging on to their every word. This is the new face of the teacher. The problem is not the academics. It is in the people who are custodians of the knowledge.

One of the greatest legacies of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it forced a lethargic and comfortable world to move forward. Before the pandemic, concepts like remote working were unconceivable, but today it is the norm. So great is the impact of this that we now have new expressions like Zoom fatigue!

Unless we redefine what education is, we will keep championing the cause of the school alone as an entity and we run a great risk of churning out well schooled illiterates.

Wale Akinyemi is the convenor of The Street University (www.thestreetuniversity.com) [email protected]

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