Educators need to increase their adaptability and flexibility

Educators need to increase their adaptability and flexibility

Simon Marcus Gower, Jakarta

Our world of flux and ever increasing change means that
today's technology is quickly surpassed. What is true today
tomorrow may appear false. In short, stasis means that you will
be left behind and so it is for this "ever-moving" world that
educators must try to prepare students. This, by definition,
means that educators have to keep up-to-date and well informed
about the world, how it works and how they may work well within
it.

This engenders the need for flexibility and the ability to
adapt quickly to the constant challenges that arise. It also
reduces room for rigid dogmatism and any sense of ultimate and
dictatorial authority. In any school, (or indeed any education
institute), there is always the danger that notions of authority
and discipline may be extended too far.

In this sense, there may be an institutionalized conformity
that, whilst giving teachers and students a point of reference,
risks being a kind of ritualized order that amounts to an
intransitive nature and stubbornness that tends to preclude the
possibility of flexibility and adaptability.

For schools this kind of institutionalized, stubborn dogmatism
can be a sad and constricting experience. Education should really
be about opening young people's eyes and minds up to the world
around them. Doing this in a flexible and cooperative way is one
way in which schools may engender positive and enthusiastic
responses from their students; intransigence on the part of
educators inevitably shackles and confines students.

A failure to be flexible represents a leaning towards stasis
and promotes an artificiality that hinders student growth and
appreciation of our changing and challenging world. Students need
to be brought into the real world and appreciate and understand
the modern global context in which they will have to perform and
survive.

Many schools in Indonesia are prone to a stasis that is
stifling. They create a near oppressive environment in which
students are not encouraged to be spontaneous and natural in
their growth and exploration of what they can do.

Often schools fall guilty of stifling childhood to the point
where prohibition and unnatural control prevent the developing
person from emerging properly and well from childhood to
adulthood. This leaves students relatively immature.

Take a recent example of a junior high school student who was
able to offer insight into American life during a geography
class. The young boy was enthusiastic to offer his thoughts and
keen to share his experiences because he had recently visited
relatives in the US. But his teacher ultimately reprimanded him
for "talking too much and disturbing the class."

Instead of encouraging him as a useful human resource for the
class, the teacher became agitated by his involvement and
apparent independence. The teacher showed intransigence and some
fear of loss of control; a clear lack of flexibility in "handing
over" to the student and letting him gain a sense of
participation and value.

Sadly too often students are not given opportunities by their
teachers. Teachers should be opening up windows on the world but,
in examples such as the above students are having doors firmly
closed on them. Too often students are not sufficiently well
thought of as people. Instead they are consistently viewed as
inferiors that ought to or even must acquiesce. This closes the
door to their participation but, perhaps worse still, closes the
door to their emotions and to their possible passions to
participate.

Teachers really should be exemplars in their abilities to
understand and appreciate other people. By having a strong and
positive appreciation of others it becomes possible to be
flexible. It becomes possible to assimilate change and difference
and it is possible to improve and accommodate new concepts and
approaches.

In a real sense we are living in a time of transition and
change and times like this demand adaptability and the ability to
communicate well. But, importantly, communication must include
receiving as well as sending. This means that teachers must be
flexible to accommodate the changing world around them, but they
must also be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of their
students.

This creates the need to recognize education as more than the
mere accumulation of facts. It demands that educators appreciate
that the changing times in which we live generate a condition in
which it is far more important to help students to learn how to
think rather than just what to think.

Students, in our time, increasingly need to be equipped with
the ability to think for themselves. This means helping them to
improve their minds rather than overload their minds with endless
facts they must remember.

This encompasses a more holistic approach to education. It
includes recognition and development of the person, the
individual and the character that must contain thoughts and
emotions to survive in the changing world. To survive and
potentially succeed in our ever-changing world academic skills
need to be balanced with life skills. If this does not happen,
then education becomes superficial and merely self-serving and
not serving the needs of the students or society more generally.

There remains the danger that education in Indonesian schools
may be "superficial" unless educators recognize and respond to
the need for greater flexibility and adaptability.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget observed that the "goal of
education in schools should be creating men and women who are
capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other
generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive
and discoverers."

With the challenges of globalization and our changing world,
educators must become more open to change and be able to
cultivate an ability in their students to be receptive and
capable of working with change.

The writer is Executive Principal of the High/Scope Indonesia.
The opinions expressed above are personal.