Schools must teach pupils to think

Schools must teach pupils to think

Iwan Pranoto, Bandung

It has now become very difficult to make predictions about our
future with a high degree of precision. In the industrious age
human beings might easily have predicted what the future might
look like in the subsequent 30 years.

However, at present, we do not have that luxury anymore. We
cannot foretell precisely what kind of world and existence we
will have in 30 years from now. In today's digital era, some jobs
we see today may be gone in less than 10 years from now. No one
can guarantee the existence or availability of a particular job
in the next five years.

Hence, if we have a very uncertain future, how should we
prepare for it? In particular, what kind of preparation should we
provide for our children? What kind of schooling do our children
need for their future?

One definite implication of the vast acceleration in our
civilization is that modern schooling cannot provide practical
skills for certain jobs. If a school teaches specific practical
skills, when its students graduate and enter the real world, the
skills they have obtained may be useless: We may not need the
skills anymore tomorrow.

The particular software one uses at college or school today
may be obsolete when one graduates next year. Hence, if one
focuses on teaching the practical skills for using highly
specific software, for example, that would be unwise. The
practical skills of today may become impractical tomorrow. The
skills necessary for certain occupations today may be worthless
tomorrow, because once students finish their formal education
their skills may be replaced by machines. Indeed, the occupations
we train our students for today may no longer exist when they
graduate.

Therefore, educators should ponder the objectives of modern
schooling. The vocational studies provided by formal educational
institutions nowadays are challenged by the training centers from
industry. Some training centers in developed industries or
companies are far superior to the vocational studies in tertiary
education institutions. This poses questions about the
practicality of vocational studies. Indeed, do practical skills
relevant to our modern life exist?

I strongly believe that, more than ever, schooling and general
education in this modern era should assist students to become
intelligent human beings. This means that the most important
objective of modern schooling should be to make students learn to
think. The more our children learn to think, the more human our
children will become. Hence, by allowing and facilitating our
children to develop their minds, we help our children to become
more human, and that is the primary objective of our present and
future education.

PM Goh Chok Tong of Singapore reasons clearly why learning
competencies are very important for his country. He said, "A
nation's wealth in the 21st century will depend on the capacity
of its people to learn." Moreover, in 1997, he stated the vision
of Singapore's future education in a strong and clear message:
"Thinking schools, learning nation." He argued that the nation
could be sustainable only if workers thought and the people of
the entire nation learned continuously.

Our children need reasoning tools and skills for facing an
uncertain future. To overcome or solve uncertain problems in an
unclear and fast-moving tomorrow, one needs abilities to learn
and relearn, more than ever before. The ability to think and to
learn will become very handy and practical for the world of
tomorrow. Thus, one may conclude that thinking and learning are
the two most versatile skills of tomorrow for our children.

This may seem paradoxical. On the one hand, pragmatic people
see that the ability to think and learn is rather impractical.
For some people who condone a quick-fix culture, this view is, of
course, correct. Yet, from the experience of our own
civilization, we observe that thinking and learning are indeed
the truest practical competencies we can provide for our children
who face an uncertain future.

Now, if we accept that thinking and learning are the two most
important competencies for the future, educators have some
homework to do. Educators should think deeply about how to teach
our children to think and learn. This implies that the subjects
learned today in school should be seen as vehicles for achieving
the competencies to think and learn. The subjects themselves are
not the primary objective of schooling, but the ability to think
and learn is.

Around the world, educators and governments should make
essential national standards for school systems that stress
thinking and learning skills. As the main objectives of schooling
are to think and learn, learning processes in schools should
promote and foster the development of thinking process and
lifelong learning. School standards deemed essential should make
curricula lean and assessments relevant to modern life. Hence,
our children and teachers could focus on the development of
reasoning processes and learning skills.

Another important requirement to realize the enrichment of the
thinking process in schools is the teacher factor. There should
be systematic development programs in pre-service and in-service
professional development programs for schoolteachers. Developing
countries, in particular, should recognize that while the human
resource development of schoolteachers is difficult to measure,
it is one of the most practical and feasible solutions for the
present education situation.

Thus, at present, our children call for the leadership of
educators and governments to retool school systems so that they
promote thinking and learning capacities.

The writer is a lecturer in the mathematics department at
Bandung Institute of Technology.