While the debate about the teaching of critical race theory rages from the halls of Congress to school board meetings across the country, others are about the business of reimagining and revolutionizing the educational system in ways that address the real issues of the digital decade.
Primarily, education should be about answering the question of what do our children need to learn, and secondly, how do they learn. Also, how do we teach them in ways that personalize their experience and capitalize on their inherent interests and strengths?
K-12 traditional classroom learning and a one-size-fits-all curriculum based on age and ostensibly grade level could be an outdated model.
As for the four-year college degree, we must ask ourselves, “Why four years?” College was basically conceptualized over 200 years ago as a finishing school for the nobility based on the idea that four years was the right amount of time to obtain a college degree.
We are overdue for a paradigm shift.
Rote memorization without understanding the content in a way that ties it to an understanding of the real world or that draws out our capacity for intuitive thinking so that we actually experience the joy of learning, while developing our analytical skills and creativity, simply will not work in the 21st-century digital decade.
The American educational system focuses on test scores graduation rates and, of late, on dividing students by race, while superimposing a top-down government ideology focused on the complex moral and social issues of our time. This essentially tells students what and how to think. Education should instead be about “potential realized or squandered, dignity enhanced or denied.”
Online learning communities, such as Skillshare, and digital education videos found on YouTube allow students to approach new topics “at his or her own tempo” with no penalty for progressing slowly — no “looking dumb” in a classroom of their peers.
Personalized education — creating experiences that tie learning to real-world experiences, allow students to progress at their own pace — will be critical to the ongoing paradigm shift in education.
And while some students excel at self-paced learning in programs such as Skillshare, others require a more structured setting. That’s where institutions such as the Genius Group of schools are so critical.
The Genius Group of schools teaches not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, but they help students understand how artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented reality, decentralized finance, digital currencies, the emergence of the Metaverse, IoT, and hyper-personalization will help shape the future. These are critical trends for students and entrepreneurs to embrace in order to be successful in the 21 st century.
The Genius Group and its faculty teach students how to apply the principles of success while teaching core subjects with both an online curriculum and a community of K-12 schools. Additionally, they offer micro-courses with personalized tutoring and global educational summits on a variety of topics all themed around how to thrive in the digital decade and gain an entrepreneurial edge. They also have their own university which grants undergraduate and graduate degrees.
To reform education in the world, we need not pontificate. We must put a new philosophy of education into action. Educators and administrators must rethink why they push students ahead when they have severe gaps in their learning, why rote memorization and the traditional classroom setting is an outdated model for the 21 st century.
Personalization and mastery learning is more mainstream than ever. Both parents and teachers are starting to work together on a global level to find innovative ways to integrate tech with teaching to personalize learning and prepare students for the digital decade.
The Genius Group is a dominant visionary, leading the global transformation in education.
