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.