"Train students in the world of tomorrow and not in the one from which we come"

Yong Zhao of the University of Oregon gave an inspiring and humorous talk about dropping out of school, special needs students and the current school curriculum at the last uLead summit. Here is a summary of what he said.

The uLead summit closing conference, held in Banff from April 24-27, 2016, was offered by Yong Zhao, President and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education at the College of Education at the University of Oregon. It is with humor and tact that he used examples ranging from the Little Red Nosed Reindeer to stars like Lady Gaga to address the topics of early school leaving, students with special needs and the current school curriculum. Here is an overview of what he said.

Throughout his presentation, he likened the current education system to a machine for making sausages. Standardized sausages appreciated by consumers: the “flesh” used being all the potential and the unique color of a child and the final sausage, having the same shape, the same taste and the same characteristics, regardless of the starting individual . This final sausage taking the role of the result obtained following this process on an adult who has passed through his studies. He insists that all are born with the opportunity to become exceptional, endowed with natural talents and unique characteristics and interests. According to him, the current curriculum leads students to tackle content and develop a set of skills that “could be useful” rather than focusing on essential skills and offering students the opportunity to develop to their full potential. exploiting ITS differences, his passions.

Taken from: Fixing the Past or Inventing the Future: education reforms that matter, Yong Zhao, uLead 2016.

The skills on which the success of our era is based are, according to him:

• the ability to detect problems to be solved;
• the ability to use one's creativity and personal essence to resolve them well;
• the ability to invent the future.

Returning to the evaluation style that we currently favor, it highlights the following problem: we evaluate a student's ease in passing an exam rather than the demonstration of his competence to identify and solve a really engaging problem. We prepared him by providing him with a range of tools to use "just in case" rather than placing him in a real situation to develop, or even reinvent thanks to his creativity, his curiosity, his passions.

He asks: the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stone. To improve education, a paradigm must die, he says. Are we waiting for the end of the oil age to act? The 4^e age is upon us, that of artificial intelligence. Are we adequately preparing our succession?

Do we want to fix students deficits to make them mediocres, or allow them to be exceptional?

To counter the "sausage machine", he believes that the teacher must vary his approaches and highlight the talent and strengths of each student. He becomes a spark for this exceptional being in the making. The school must adapt to children and not the other way around. We note a disengagement of several students and we allow ourselves to blame them! It is our responsibility to train them for the world of today and not for the one from which we came. This is the reason why they must be our center of interest and why we must adapt our formulas so that they are more representative of current society and the challenges they will have to meet. Thus, involvement and motivation will be there and we will witness the birth of a new paradigm in education, a valuation of education.

Taken from: Fixing the Past or Inventing the Future: education reforms that matter, Yong Zhao, uLead 2016.

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