Are We Educating Our Children for a Working World that Will Not Want Them?
“The central theme of this book causes us to reflect upon why we worry about our children in school. After all, we think how school can help our children to learn, and we trust teachers to do their best so that our children can gain the best grades when they leave school, but we do not understand why they do not get the grades we wish and so why they are deprived of the opportunities in life we hope for them.
Much of this is because we do not understand what school really is and why, as a society, we have it. Every society requires citizens who will comply with its moral guidelines and who are able to work with the level of technology that drives their society. The real purpose of school is purely and solely to meet these two criteria. This is why education is funded by its government, and so the real reason why it exists.
It is upon this basis that teachers are trained, and then conditioned in the efficiency of their job as they present information to their students and assess the performance their students make. By this manner the students of education, from those just entering the infant school to those leaving university, will struggle with their personal opportunities and the dis-advantages and distractions they can overcome to succeed in their grades. This is the strategy of education.
This mind frame of education arose in the 19th Century to produce the type of citizen required in that rapidly developing industrial age. In the late 20th Century, it was caused to change as the social atmosphere did. Now, in the 21st Century, education still produces a citizen, albeit a modified one, that was to serve a world that no longer exists. For the citizen of the 21st century must work and live under very different circumstances than those of 150 years ago. Yet, although AI is forcing us to develop an entirely new approach to how we educate children, there exists no real understanding of this in school today. This book reexamines the purpose of school and the subjects taught to enable the future citizen to live and survive in a world dominated by AI, where too few jobs will really exist.
What the experts say:
“Roy Andersen’s writings about how education works, and why we need to change it as artificial intelligence takes over more of our world, are becoming legendary.
This book slightly deals with the subject of AI and instead examines the role of school as it is now, considering why so many children gain low marks in it. In time, it moves to examine how the teacher and the parents, working together, could help our children overcome the toxic world they live in and study better as we prepare them for a world dominated by AI.
The book discusses new subjects that should be brought into the curriculum to make school more worthy of the needs of the 21st century citizen worker. teachers and parents can better work together:
- Helping students to get better marks.
- The rising influence of AI.
- How will our youth handle high unemployment?
- Help for parents.
- Tips for teachers.
- Thoughts on a new curriculum to better prepare our children
for their future.
This book provides a plan and a concept for how we may better prepare our children for the unknown and disturbing future we are moving into. A world where jobs will become less, populations increase, global weather more unpredictable, social problems demanding more responsible citizens and a technology that threatens to take over what we know and who we are. This book gives thoughts on a new school structure that is desperately needed worldwide. Although, AI is forcing us to develop an entirely new approach to how we educate our children, there exists no real understanding of this in school today.”
Prof / Dean Emeritus David Martin Ph.D Gallaudet University Washington, D.C. USA
https://www.amazon.com/Educating-Children-Working-World-that/dp/B0C2S71SDZ
Page Samples:
Chapter One
The Planned Inefficiency of Education
“Independent self-reliant people would be a counter productive anachronism in the collective society of the future, where people will be defined by their associations.”
John Dewey
Example A:
Learning to Improve Student Learning:
“… The key to good grades is enabling each student to keep up with each lesson. The reality is that the most get lost in a lesson or fail to put in the effort to thereafter keep up. This is much their cause of misunderstanding and confusion as each lesson progresses. A most valuable technique I had developed, while working in a university in Japan where I had 130 students in my classes, is to line the class up in two rows. In this way, each student will question or help the partner facing them. When used correctly, this technique helps to ensure that every single student understands all of their lesson and gains the confidence to take their control over their own learning.
This is the most valuable tip I can give to an educator, but knowing of it and knowing how to use it is not the same. So, I invite any interested educationalist to read up on how to do this most effectively. It works from small children to undergraduates. In fact, I use this when lecturing to professors. It enables each a chance to catch up on a point they missed in this or a previous lesson and so prevents misunderstands and confusion in learning. You will see how much everyone loves it. It is a valuable part of the concept of a Classroom of Inquiry…”
Example B:
1.0 Introduction:
Education is presented to its social community as an institut
ion that seeks to develop children to the best of their capability. It gains support for its operations because the community recognizes the significance of personal development. However, despite the impression we have cultivated of it in our more egalitarian times, education does not exist for the well being of children, and it is not immediately responsible to the parents for the development of their child.
Education exists because it provides a training facility that prepares the upcoming generation to take over the working responsibilities of their society and so maintain its functional operation; as such it is an arm of government and operates about the planned use of its product to society. As the vast body of education maneuvers itself to provide the level of competence in its students demanded by the society, it continually encounters two criticisms that seek to give it direction.
The most discussed and so the more notable criticism stems from the parents. This is when they individually find concern with the performance of their child in their class, and predict from this some limitation of opportunity that will be extended to them as an adult in their society. Or collectively for the same reason, when awareness arises that another group of children are experiencing some greater developmental opportunity in their education. The other criticism comes from the employment sector when it feels a notable inadequacy in the ability of children leaving school, to the level of aptitude and adaptability required of them for the efficiency of its work operations.
To deal with the collective concern of parents, education reshuffles the resources it has in attempt to satisfy the greater political force that supports them. In seeking to satisfy the individual parent it creates parent evenings where the teacher is to reassure the parent of their ability, and so that of the system which employs them, to provide the optimum development for the child.
Most parents find this reassuring, at least those who attend, either because they desire to trust the system they believe shares their mutual interest, or because they are ever wary of how easily their concern could go against their child, should they annoy the teacher who controls their grades. Many parents are too scared to upset the teacher in fear that that teacher will take it out on their child, and grade them lowly because of this. I have experienced how this can be a real danger more than once. However, to those not so satisfied, they may re-mortgage their home and seek to place their child in a better school, where they believe they will receive more personal attention. Those not able to do this are left to realize that their child’s future lies in the personal efforts they may or may not muster, and are ultimately left to rely upon a hope that the teacher of each subject will have the desire and time to help their child.
Since the personal security of the educational staff depends upon how well they may convince the parents of the strenuousness of their efforts, the act of professionalism is well and truly perfected. Should they fail in this, they have resort to a strength of union commitment that places them largely above the law of accountability. Education’s responsibility to the employment sector is of a very different vein.
At its design level, education seeks to inquire from employers the type and level of skills they require, and consults with social designers how its intake may be better prepared and assisted in their social development to enable education to produce better the level of competence in its students that is required. With this provision, education then seeks greater finance to adapt to these changes, by which it may provide a better service to support the operation of its society. In the simplest sense, such operation of society requires that citizens perform different tasks. The purpose of education is to select children and prepare them with the necessary capability to be able to comply with the different demands of each.
In its not too distant past a right to education, and so opportunity for the more rewarding jobs in society, was based on the wealth and social standing of the parents. In this way, a continuity of a family’s wealth and level of social recognition was maintained over generations, as this supported the structure of the society.
As our civilization became more technological, education incurred two profoundly deep changes. In one, this new technology demanded that children be better educated, to be more capable of meeting its operational demands. In the other, as the level of technology developed, it brought deep changes to the political structure of the society causing it to be ever more egalitarian, which meant that education was caused to support this social change. In order to meet this new criteria radical changes were made in the ways children were taught and assessed, because opportunity in education was now desired to be seen to be based on ability and not wealth or social influence.
However, the definition of what ability is, changed to accommodate the political changes within education, as various factions vied to control influences within it. In the first instance, this struggle lay between social factions (the different class levels of the society), and thereafter between cultural ones (the rising influences of immigrants). Each faction struggled to alter the way education worked, and so how it taught and assessed, as each sought to provide their children with greater opportunity in education and so greater security in the future society.
The average citizen today does not recognize this, and the more egalitarian the society is, the more discreet is the planning that lies beneath how it operates. With this being so, the average citizen today takes it for granted that all children have the right to gain an education, and that it is provided for their natural development. This opinion leads to the reasoning that education is intended to be given “more or less” with equal provision. Explanation stems from this that the work opportunities available to young people once they leave their education, are a reflection of the natural ability they demonstrated in their education. Let us examine the myth behind this…..”
Example C:
Of the teacher:
“ …. Some educationalists argue that our age of recession has created many social difficulties for children, and that poverty is the problem behind poor grades. Reasoning as they do that: “The main reason for poor student performance is being ignored – a level of childhood poverty, the consequences of which no amount of schooling can effectively counter.” Equally, the following remark was made very recently, but it could have been written anytime in the last 150 years:
“The collection of nationwide data do point to a primary cause of school failure, but it is poverty, not teacher quality.”
However, consider now two accounts of teacher quality. In the first we find that Kenshaft, as a professor of mathematics, interviewed fifty teachers at an elementary school. In doing this, she discovered that not a single teacher knew how to find the area of a rectangle. Their common excuse was that knowledge of this came later in the curriculum, so that there was no need for them to know this now. This may be true, but the very significant point that Kenshaft raised was that none of the fifty teachers had enough understanding of multiplication to “know” how to work out how the area may be calculated. They simply did not know, because they did not really understand what multiplication was about. Indeed, she also found that while these teachers taught algorithms for multiplying one two-digit numbers, none were able to explain how such an algorithm worked. Not one teacher, out of this fifty interviewed, understood that:
In the second, we find that within America, the State of Massachusetts is regarded as one of the better states for education. Teachers wishing to work in this state are required to take a test in basic literacy. It is not insignificant to note here that more than a third of teachers applying for a post fail this basic literacy test every year….”
The book continues to explain the cause of such teacher failing and how schools can improve the teaching quality of their teachers. It also explains how parents can better prepare their child for school and how they can help them through their many years of learning.
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Most importantly, many of the subjects taught in school today are out of date with the needs of the world of tomorrow. This book presents a new curriculum, with subjects that are designed for the real world of A.I. that our children must learn to survive in. These subjects are desperately needed in every school globally.
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Available in Kindle, Paperback and Hardback
https://www.amazon.com/Educating-Children-Working-World-that/dp/B0C2S71SDZ