While we pick up the pieces
If history teaches us one thing, it is that people seem to make the same mistakes over and over again. Our year looks like it just got extended into another gigantic mess, while we were just about dusting off (carelessly, of course) from 2020. While we look at early education in India, the biggest evidence of change came from the fact that we need to be better prepared for a hybrid system of online and offline. Our time and resources went into how to continue from last year, that we didn’t even focus on what. While we are still far behind in the basics of how we are looking at health and safety for schools, teaching aids, equipping our teachers, shifting to better engagement online, we should still learn the right lessons beyond these.
Trial and error are a part of any change. Nassim Nicholas Taleb mentioned in Anti-fragile, one needs to be intelligent in recognizing the favourable outcome and knowing what to discard. This applies to what role education will play in the future, which has already been overthrown in the past year. What we are teaching our children and how their choices to study now will impact their working lives are completely unknown.
Better access to curation and content for teachers: How are they able to adapt to a changing curriculum, which will not be relevant by the time the students graduate? Is there an option to get this content and train teachers regularly? This is not easy and it will be an ongoing step. We should build it into our system.
Careers should be non-linear: We wait too long to let our children find out that careers are not a straight line. This is even more imperative when they are making choices about what to study when they are as early as 15 or 18-years-old. India is a hub for technology but it is hard to imagine that the same career choices in engineering or MBA should be the way forward for children starting out now. We need to educate parents, more than students about this reality.
Understanding industry and future of work sooner: The conversation about the future of work applies to the supply-side as well. If we are not engaging companies and schools/educators early enough, the ability to make changes will diminish. Our industry collaboration is so weak offers nothing to let students explore. Who is challenging them to think differently? Find the non-linear opportunities early on, give students a flavour of the future, encourage risk-taking in our young children.
Build a system of risk-taking: We don’t encourage risk-taking at a very broad level in India especially when it comes to our children. We eliminate trial and error, move our children away from the reality that we think will harm them. Taleb mentions in his book that children are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. Can we build risk-taking to challenge, pause, create uncertainties, build self-discovery and ask them questions when and before they make choices?
This past year and looks like most of 2021, is a significant event in that process of change. We cannot expect everyone to be the same when this pandemic ends.
Referencing Morgal Housel’s blog: https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-big-lessons-of-the-last-year/ here: Daniel Kahneman says that when you experience a surprise the correct takeaway is not to assume that event will happen again; it’s to accept that the world is surprising.
The world definitely is not the same place anymore. Our expectations of how and what choices our children make are based on what we know about the world now. That has already been shattered. Let’s pick up the pieces while we teach them about the world, understanding that it is going to look different.
Yes, the kid started the new school year this week which should explain this.
