by Mr. Hans

Created on: July 09, 2008   Last Updated: July 14, 2008

(ver.2)

We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
-Pink Floyd

Education is, without doubt, a vital and sensitive component of governance for both the developing and developed world today. Yet despite its strong initial ideological goals, the subject has been proving to be a baffling and difficult topic even for many national leaders to handle. Regardless of cultural doctrine or politics, few countries can disagree with education's importance, and even fewer will concur that education provides the ideal long-term solution to a multitude of problems ranging from the plague of long-term poverty to that of domestic violence. It's also education that's meant to prepare the next generation for the future's unpredictability that we ourselves can barely grasp, and its education that is touted to be the only practical and probable solution to vital issues such as climate change.

Yet the ever-recurring controversies over rote-learning, the constant stigmatization of mistakes and the ongoing process of academic inflation only seem to warn us that perhaps our current system is starting to show signs of failure. The current system, built based on the demands of rapid industrialization over a hundred years ago, are fast becoming irrelevant in today's new information age and urgently needs to be rethought before it perhaps becomes far too late.

Education guru Sir Ken Robinson made perhaps one of the strongest arguments against the usage of failure in the classroom, where he argued that current education systems squander human talent and educated people out of their creative capacities rather than into them. The constant stigmatization of mistakes and failure in national education systems, he argued, has created a situation where children eventually lose their capacity to be unafraid to take chances and make mistakes.

The impacts of this are severe, as while failure certainly does not equate to creativity, what perhaps is more important is that if people are not prepared to be wrong, they will never come up with anything original. Original and novel ideas are fast becoming a desperately important resource needed in the countless rapidly evolving industries today, and we simply cannot continue to ruthlessly squander away the creative capacities of entire generations if we still aspire to prepare them for the future that lies ahead of them. The skills of literacy and numeracy

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