New Paradigms from 21st Century Education
When we consider priorities for the 21 st century, education is at the very core of our concerns. The role of education is arguably the most critical variable in projecting a satisfactory and sustainable future for mankind. But do the present structures and approaches to education still respond to the needs and challenges of the 21 st century? This question lies at the core of national and international efforts to deal with urgent issues such as universal access to education and the changed social and economic conditions prevailing in today's interconnected and globalized societies.
By Victor Ordoñez and Siegfried Ramler
While our post-industrial world reflects quantum shifts in society and its fundamental institutions, education has been virtually exempt from this process of radical change. Despite the phenomenon of globalization, social, economic, and cultural gaps have become wider in most societies. Economics and technology have changed the way people live and work in advanced communities throughout the world, while vast other communities still live in cultural patterns unchanged over centuries, more deeply isolated and quagmired in poverty than ever before. And yet, for both the advantaged and the poor, the present structures for education, where it is available, remain basically the same: prescribed primary schooling of about six years, organized by age cohorts, and followed by secondary education focused on largely rigid academic subject classifications, with higher education available to a select minority. Critical problems of inequity and polarization have now far outpaced the efforts of education systems to reform themselves. These realities call for systemic changes in the approaches to education and a readiness to accept new paradigms to guide educational policy and practice. The search is not for single new paradigm, but for as many new paradigms as are demanded by the diverse learning needs of vastly different communities and societies at different stages of development in different socio-cultural settings. The search for new paradigms does not imply rejection of the basic ethos of learning and schooling, as practiced over centuries, nor of the values of an educational process that nurtures intellectual growth and creativity. It does recognize that much of the present structure of education and much that now occupies the time of the learner must be rethought in light of the demands of the 21 st century.
LIFELONG LEARNING
For today's learners, there is dissonance between what formal schooling offers and how they live, how they learn and acquire information, and how they prepare for work and careers. Today's learners face different life patterns. Rather than one lifelong career, they now face the probability of multiple and even simultaneous careers. The linear career pattern is replaced by a cyclical pattern where an individual may resume study to pursue another career or interest, often interchanging work, study, and rest periods several times in the life span. Even those who remain in their chosen fields find that their formal schooling did not prepare them for new workplace demands and must return for further education and training. A new paradigm for education must therefore assume a society of perpetual learning where individuals will continue to meet emerging learning needs throughout life. This calls for education that no longer takes place in a lockstep, assembly line process, depending on age clusters and a sequence of credentials, but rather for a setting where learners pick from a variety of education options at various periods in their lives. Currently, many independent education initiatives, outside of the structured school system, foreshadow a response to this challenge by offering alternatives. Home schooling has become an increasingly prevalent option for families with the commitment and skills to undertake this challenge. Other options include computer-based self-instruction, online courses, and distance learning for specific technical or even interpersonal skills. Thus, schools and universities can no longer regard themselves as the exclusive dispensers of knowledge and credentials, but must meet the challenge of finding their niche and relevance in a new environment.
RELATIONAL SKILLS
In the industrial society of the 19 th and most of the 20 th century, the workplace required a set of specific skills, largely unchanged during the work tenure of an employee. It was reasonable to assume that skills acquired and certified through schooling would fit the requirements of a given employer. In today's knowledge society, the rapid pace of change in the workplace requires flexibility, improvisation, and ability to adapt to changing needs. Rather than information for specific skills, the challenge for today's learning experience is capacity building. Rather than compartmentalized learning segments of specific subjects, a multifaceted integration of knowledge is essential to enable learners to function successfully. The development of relational skills is an essential ingredients, fostering cooperation in the planning and implementing of tasks. In many professions, specific skills tend to be quickly outdated in the rapid pace of technological innovations. Thus, today's knowledge society places a high premium on the ability to project and to improvise. It is evident that the present system of formal schooling must explore an appropriate and realistic relationship between curriculum, study experiences, and the requirements of the workplace in the 21 st century.
"HAVES" AND "HAVE NOTS"
On the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, the vast educational needs in the disenfranchised areas of the world, not significantly affected by industrial and post-industrial development, require a new vision and new approaches to meet global challenges affecting huge populations. Millions of children lack access to basic education. In some countries children drop out of school even before completing primary education and are thus condemned to lives of poverty and illiteracy. The quality of schooling, where schooling is available, is often deficient and does not provide employable or income generating skills. In many instances, the unreached - whether they are ethnic minorities, refugees, street children, or those with special needs - remain so because they are expected to adjust and to adapt to the system, instead of the system adjusting and adapting to them. If the aim of education for all is to be achieved, innovative ways of meeting these children's needs beyond traditional schooling will have to be found. The issue of providing access to education with limited resources demands flexibility in the provision of learning sites where needed, flexibility in providing and compensating instructors, and ways of motivating families to send children to school.
For example, a response to the enormous problems of girls out of school in Rajastan, India, illustrates how emerging new paradigms represent fresh hope for combating intractable illiteracy. An NGO named Lok Jumbish established camps in various urban centers to house girls from 6 to 15 with a handful of motivated live-in teachers in a total learning environment for six months. Learning took place constantly in various forms, with girls grouped according to interest and capacity rather than by age cohort. At the end of six months, many adolescent girls who had never been to school were able to pass achievement tests to enable them to enter the fifth year of primary schooling.
The provision of sufficient and competent teachers presents a huge challenge in the developing world, inadequately addressed by teacher training institutions. The response to that need requires a fresh approach and flexibility in the choice and placement of teachers where they are needed. Rather than bound by rigid methodology and curriculum, teachers placed in regions of high need would focus on basic literacy and on the preparation of students to function adequately in their social and economic environment.
NEEDS OF INDIGENOUS CULTURES
In facing the importance to preserve indigenous cultures through education, the example of Pacific Island communities represents a pertinent case study. Decades of education reforms have failed to provide the human resources needed to achieve social, cultural, and economic goals for these communities. Indeed, the more Western-based schooling young people in these communities receive, the less likely they are to remain in their village or on their island. Ideally, schools should help children grow intellectually and socially by expanding their understanding of their cultural heritage, so that they could discover better ways of managing their environment and their livelihood. For many postcolonial societies this has not been the case. The key challenge is to prepare young people to live succesfully and productively in their own indigenous societies, if they so choose, rather than feel pressure to emigrate in search of a livelihood and opportunities elsewhere. Here is the key provision of opportunity and choice, a provision related not only to education but also to economic conditions. Howard Gardner's call to educators to apply the concept of multiple intelligences in the teaching approach, beyond the verbal and mathematical/logical approaches underlying the present curriculum, furnishes one of the necessary responses to this challenge. An approach that integrates the cultural and environmental characteristics of the society in the teaching and learning process, that nurtures environmental, artistic, and spatial intelligences particular to the society, and that builds self-esteem in the learner, represents a needed imperative for education everywhere, and particularly for indigenous communities.
GLOBAL LITERACY
Life in the 21 st century requires understanding, sensitivity, and skills to cope with the phenomena of globalization and global interindependence, linking the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of globalization to the process of education. Implicit in this phenomenon is the imperative at all stages of the educational process to reflect the need for individuals, communities, and nations to manage interdependence in peaceful, equitable, and sustainable ways.
Environmental awareness is an imperative that transcends national boundaries. This includes such concerns as the depletion of natural resources the quality of the air we breathe, the quality of the world's oceans and rivers, the spread of infectious diseases, and the limits of industrial development. The environmental threat and the need for an environmental ethic represent crucial issues for education throughout the world and demand the attention of schools and curriculum developers. The implications of global interdependence for curriculum and teaching are evident. In an interconnected world, virtually every field of study, whether in the social or natural sciences, in the arts or in technology, in vocations or in creation, has international dimensions. As many nations come to terms with the plurality of their cultures and the artificiality of their borders, an education that ignores or downplays this diversity becomes a source of alienation and conflict. Education has not yet caught up to the realities of global interdependence and societal diversity, as evidenced by course structures, texts, and course descriptions that too often reflect a lack of integration and an outdated compartmentalization of educational experiences. The teaching of social studies furnishes a pertinent example. When history teaching and history texts are focused primarily on one's own country, placing other nations and societies into the periphery, the consequence, whether or not intended, is a deficient understanding of global linkages impacting the past, present, and future. A design of a fresh conceptual framework for curriculum, which builds on global interdependence and which places teaching and learning approaches into a global context, represents a needed first step for a paradigmatic shift.
IN-SERVICE TRAINING
Currently, teachers throughout the world receive the bulk of their professional education before they enter the profession. Their pre-service training then dominates their classroom practice for the duration of their tenure in teaching. In-service training, when it is available, tends to be sporadic and rarely involves fundamental innovations. Under these circumstances, teachers are ill equipped to master and implement the needed changes in teaching content and practice. Given the rapid pace of societal change, the current system produces a built-in obsolescence of the profession to the detriment of learners. For teacher-training institutions and the teaching profession, new paradigms imply a fundamental shift in what is taught, when it is taught, how it is taught, and what measure of success is used for evaluating the learning experience. For example, since learners tend to use only a small fraction of their formal studies of mathematics in their daily lives and careers,is the age and content sequence of mathematics teaching from basic numeracy to advanced algebra still appropriate for current needs? Are there alternative pathways for learning of different kinds of information and skills? How can traditional structures of schooling be revised to build in the educational flexibility and content required in the 21 st century? In the year 2000, The UNESCO Commission on Education for the 21 st Century produced a report that summarized the mission of education in four key pillars: learning to know, learning to do, learning to be, and learning to live together. Past and current paradigms of education are skewed in favor of the first pillar - learning to know, the acquisition of information. The current ills of society - ethnic conflicts, war, environmental degradation - are the price being paid for the neglect of the other three pillars, and particularly the fourth pillar - learning to live together.
The exploration of new paradigms for education must be an internationally collaborative undertaking, calling for the commitment and efforts of visionaries in the educational arena and for a blend of idealism and pragmatism to deal with the wide range of challenges that confront us.
