ABOUT THE EPISODE:
Nobody can argue that the world has changed dramatically in recent years, and continues to change with amazing speed. Yet, we have not changed the basic approach to educating our children for the past 200 years.
The current system of education — both at the school and university level — assumes that a finite amount of ‘knowledge’ is available. The emphasis is on cramming as much of this knowledge as possible into the available years of education. Think about the changes our children will face before they retire from the working world in 60 years. Will our current approach to education be adequate to equip these children to face the emerging world? Can we continue with our assembly-line approach to teaching our children, rather than acknowledging and nurturing the unique gifts and talents that each one of them represents? Should education be restricted, primarily, to the first 20 years of our lives? Or should the focus shift to focus shift to life-long learning?
Alvin Toffler, in ‘The Third Wave’, describes mass education as being built on the Industrial Age factory model to teach basic reading, writing and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects — the overt curriculum. Beneath it was the covert curriculum that was far more basic. It consisted of three courses — punctuality, obedience and repetitive work — the basic training requirements to produce reliable, productive factory workers. Will the 21st century world require just these capabilities? Howard Gardner’s Project Zero at Harvard discovered that up to age four, almost all children are at genius level, in terms of the multiple frames of intelligence — spatial, kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, mathematical, intrapersonal, and linguistic. But by age 20, the genius level proportion of the tested population dropped to 2%. We are educating the intelligence out of our children. Instead, we need to nurture and develop the multiple frames of intelligence within our schools and colleges We need to fuel imagination, which Einstein said is more important than knowledge. In this episode our guest has stressed upon the importance of reinventing education system to nurture the global citizens.
About the Guest:
Dr. Ai Addyson-Zhang is an educator and an entrepreneur. She received her MA and Ph.D. in Communication from Syracuse University and the University of Maryland. Ai is the founder of Classroom Without Walls, an alternative school to future-proof the next generation. Ai is also an Adobe Insider, Adobe Education Leader, and HubSpot Academy Instructor. As a thought leader in online education, Dr. Ai specializes in incorporating social media and creative technologies into traditional curriculum to enhance student engagement and acquire 21st-century skills. Dr. Ai’s work has been featured in Forbes, Inside Higher Education, Pearson Education, Entrepreneur, The Today Show, & others. Additionally, Dr. Ai hosts two weekly live streaming shows, where she interviews industry leaders in Business and Education, such as Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki. Dr. Ai additionally serves as a SEMrush Webinar guest and host. Dr. Ai frequently speaks at academic and industry conferences including Inbound, VidCon, SEMrush Global Marketing Day, Social Media Day, Social Media Week Lima (the largest social media marketing conference in the midwest), and others.
