Blog Post 3: How to Teach

How to Teach: A brief overview of the schools of thought 

Today I learned that over 10 thousand years ago, children were mostly free to self educate themselves in subjects and topics of their choosing. It can be argued that this was perhaps a creative approach to learning, but perhaps not a very practical one. As civilisations grew around the potency of farm crops each season, children were a free resources recruited by their parents as free labour for their farming. This moved their focus away from educational pursuits, in favour of their ability to perform physical labour. As a result, only the wealthy few who had no need for this free resource could afford their children to be educated in skills they saw fit. This shift may have borne the first seeds of elitism in the educational field.

Today, we find that this system has evolved into a society that values institutes with difficult entry requirements, high fees and the promise of a successful life for your kid. Since the 1970s, privatisation has been the name of the game and everyone is trying to get in on the action. As the sheer number of students entering higher education rises, the ability for governments to keep universities free became unsustainable. Therefore, since the mid 80s, state funding as a percentage for Canadian University endowments has dropped from a whopping 81% to 50% and private funding has shot up almost 4 fold. Since students are willing to pay for the undergraduate degrees, sponsored by government loans, universities have passed on their rising costs onto the students. A similar, yet more aggressive trend can be noted in the U.S. where the system is more privatised to the extent that student loans are owned by private banks and an inability to pay it back only adds to your interest on these loans since citizens cannot declare bankruptcy based on outstanding student debt.

In their article, Duffy and Pooley write, "scholars bust creat[e] a brand and develop a digital identity". Given the trend of several universities propping up around America, claiming that they can provide a bright future for their students through their curriculum, it is no doubt then that an inability to find suitable work post graduation has caused many to question the existing system. As a result, many scholars/professors now engage in building a brand, beyond their academic circles. This means to volunteer your knowledge through mediums of social media, for the world to recognise. In fact, a famous example of one such scholar is a fellow University of Toronto professor, Jordan Peterson. He garnered his mainstream reputation through his book, "12 rules of life" but then expanded it through his tweets, interviews and free lectures. Similar ventures have been started by other scholars and departments at accredited universities who have offered their courses for free to everyone. Whether this can turn into a free for all curriculum, remains to be seen, although it will be a financial challenge to sustain such a system.

Finally, a new trend towards gamifying education has emerged out of the internet age. While some argue that the potential to turn all subjects into a game with a series of levels and missions, I have my reservations. There are certainly some subjects including math and science which I think are better suited to embrace a gamified learning approach. In my early years of education, I found that the teachers who adopted such methods to helps us learn the material, not only helped it stick but also improved my practical understanding of theories and concepts. 

Whatever the future of education may be, one this is for sure, change is needed. We need to revamp the schooling system in a way that will help kids have a growth mindset towards learning throughout their lives and the tools we use to equip them need to be redesigned and constantly altered as the jobs of the future change.