Complexities of Young People & Challenges of 21st Century Education. | Andrew Howard | TEDxUoChester

to work we are going to revolution in our education system because at the moment we are failing them I have been working in education for the best part of 30 years and in that time I have seen change after change after change initiative following initiative I have seen political swings to the left political swings to the right but standing here today I see an education system that is fundamentally unchanged to the one I started teaching in all that time ago and it is failing our children are being forced down a route of learning rote facts to regurgitate on exam papers well it's not on the test it's not important some of our most creative subjects are being squeezed out of the timetable music as we heard earlier being cut again and again and it's failing our young people we read it every day in the newspapers with mental health crises and young people in crisis so what has to change well we have to look again we have to completely reevaluate what we teach and how we teach the problem is we're delivering a system that was rooted in the 19th century designed and created for a very different world and yet if I were to bring forward from the past a 19th century school teacher he or she would probably be incredibly amazed after they've got over all the technology and how similar the structures were in our classrooms children and young people being treated like Factory products working along the conveyor about being done to recipients of knowledge with teachers as gatekeepers the problem is it's deeply embedded in our cultural DNA it's a residue from the past that becomes a habit that we cannot break but these habits this residue DNA in our culture can be so damaging and I want to give you an off topic example about 30 years ago we had the space shuttle Challenger disaster well on takeoff the Challenger Space Shuttle call fire and blew up in a fireball killing all on board ironically deeply sadly it was also carrying what was supposed to be the first-ever civilian to go into space a primary school teacher who is going to teach her first lessons from space and her entire class were at the launch site to watch the take-off what's that got to do though with what I'm talking about well the failure of the space shuttle goes back to historic cultural DNA the shuttle is probably the pinnacle of space travel for us as a society it epitomizes everything modern and technological when I first saw the shuttles taking off I was reminded of my childhood watching the science fiction movies on telly thinking wow I'm part of this new technology how amazing is that and yet as I am tend to prove to you the failure of the space shuttle goes back to the back side of a horse our first ever means of transport because what failed on the shuttle were the booster rockets and those booster rockets were manufactured a significant distance away from the launch site they had to be transported on trains trains that had a fixed-width axle and that fixed fix that with axle is common across the world and goes back hundreds of years it hasn't changed since the very first trains were made and designed and that width of the axle goes back to laziness in our Victorian era where they just took a horse-drawn carriage change the wheels and put it on the iron tracks the width is the same and those wagons those horse-drawn wagons go back hundreds of years as well before the Roman times when Goods were transported along muddy roads and they followed grooves cut through the mud by wagon after wagon after wagon if you had a wagon that had a different axle it was going to get stuck in the mud and so that wagon wave from pre-roman era to the Victorian invention of the steam train to a modern day limited the width of the booster rockets for the shuffle and that led directly to the disaster was altering in those deaths cultural residue DNA it exists in human beings and plants we have an appendix that is our residual DNA and it can cause us problems if we're not careful the same is true in culture and most importantly for education we teach the same method boxed silos to subjects teachers delivering the information and yet society has changed our young people have changed beyond any recognition the pressures on us today are wildly that are different and we need to change our education system to match that if we think about it we focus still primarily on what a conveniently called the three hours reading writing and arithmetic those three hours date back to the early days of education system where mass education was first created to provide a reasonably literate and numerate workforce to go into what at the time was new technology the factories but as we've heard earlier today those factories are now staffed by robots that do our work for us so why are we still populating our schools with curriculum designed to teach for a job that doesn't exist but we also heard about artificial intelligence becoming more and more a major part of our life and it won't be long before when you pick up a telephone to speak to somebody in a call center that actually you're not talking to somebody but something and artificial intelligence held somewhere on a server or a computer perhaps the grandchild of Alexa and Google as it is today but what will happen to the people that did those jobs or are doing those jobs now and what do we have to do to make sure that they have the right education to cope with this new future about 10 years ago somebody called Sir Ken Robinson stood on a Ted store a TED stage and gave a talk about the urgent need to change the paradigm to completely revolutionize how we deliver education all around the same sort of thing I'm saying now his TED talk has become apparently the most widely watched talk ever but nothing has changed about the same time a video went viral on the Internet shift happens in that video there's a phrase that sticks in my head very clearly that back then it said we are creating young people to go and do jobs that don't exist yet using technologies that haven't been invented yet to solve problems that we don't even know are problems yet nothing has changed twelve years ago the then chair of Ofsted for shared a very impressive committee of people who prepared a report called vision 2020 it outlined exactly what they felt young children going into nursery school needed to learn and develop as they went through their education system because they would be the young people leaving in the year 2020 that's effectively now and guess what nothing has changed so why not well I think it's what one of the other talks were saying about a habit it's become habit it's our dirty plates in the sink we're not tackling that problem but most important of all we're not responding to need we need to replace the 3 R's with a different skillset one that's much more relevant for young people of today and for your futures but what is it well the likes of Microsoft have invested heavily in research and supportive companies and groups around the world creating a new skill set and they include things like resilience something we've heard a lot during today cooperation because after all the problems that my generation have created are going to need more than single people to solve communication skills because whilst Alexa's great grandchild might be able to solve my mobile phone bill she or he may not necessarily be able to solve things more complicated than that and then using and working alongside technology because whether we like it or not technology is an important part of our lives and will continue to be so it's there it's here it's now and it is changing rapidly so rapidly now that we can't keep up with it basing that skill set then around our curriculum but is that at the heart has got to be a key priority it's got to be where we push our focus yes okay we can still teach history we can still teach geography we can still teach science and maths and English they are important because they give us us they give us our richness they make us human but I used to be a physics teacher and I used to say that the most important exciting thing I taught people was how to change a plug because more often than not you'd buy an electrical item and it wouldn't come with a plug on it nowadays it comes with a molded plug nobody needs to learn how do I plug any more and yet it's still on the science curriculum so is for example how electricity generation works it's useful maybe for some people to know that but everybody what's perhaps more useful is for us to understand how mobile phones work how technology works how we communicate how we store information what information is as one of the previous speakers said but it goes beyond that this education system we're delivering still prioritizes academic knowledge is the pinnacle of humanity but if we don't get what's beneath that right we won't it won't matter there's an amazing coming together at the moment as a psychology of neurobiology of medical imaging and educational pedagogy coming together to explain and understand how our brains learn and how we grow and develop one of the overarching things that is coming out more and more is the feedback loop between how our feelings are manifesting and how well we learn if you're anxious if you're worried if you have concerns about anything in your life it floods your body with chemicals that stops you learning things so why in school do we ignore that why in school as we're seeing in newspaper headlines at the moment make it a bad thing to exhibit your emotions headlines bad behavior zero tolerance schools now I'm a head teacher I've worked for the last 25 27 years with children and young people I've have rarely seen bad behavior what I've seen is children and young people struggling to cope with who they are struggling to understand their place in the world and not knowing how to communicate that what I've seen is children and young people desperate to be known and valued by somebody and when they don't get that they explore that and communicate it the only way they know how and we call that bad behavior I'm a young person that wants to learn sitting in a class the teacher at front is one of those doesn't tolerate any bad behavior I don't understand the lesson so I put my hand up to ask a question and I get told off how does that make me feel so we need to completely revolutionize education teachers need to stop seeing themselves as teachers of subjects I started my career my PGCE 30 odd years ago is in physics and science it took a long time of my own personal journey for me to change that label myself I am now an educator of children and young people yes I love physics I have a passion for it and I love talking about it but I love helping young people grow and engage more we need schools that see the holistic nature of young people that have counselors and support services and therapists supporting the bottom end of education the roots of young people so that we don't have people like our last speaker getting to the age they are as an adult hitting a crisis point where they have the skills and the techniques to go through that beforehand it'll also save the NHS millions I would think but we need to invest we need to put away our arguments around what is important in education we need to take away the politics from it and we need to remind ourselves that as a society our only important job is to nurture and care for and look after our young people because if we get that wrong there won't be a future and it won't be an exclamation mark or a question mark at the end of the sentence the future of the world the future of work it will be nothing because we won't have done our young people any favours at all I started education with a passion for working with young people and this far on in my career I am still deeply passionate about that because it is in our young people the future holds and it is our job to give them the skills to succeed thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 2,265

Rating: 4.9183674 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Education reform, Policy

Id: UyZONkdZg-Y

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019