Have you ever wondered how the education of your children, grandchildren, nephews, etc. could be improved? Perhaps you have meditated on your own education and how it has affected you and the decisions you have made throughout your life.
Without a doubt our education is essential to achieve success in life. So we must ask ourselves, are we giving our children an education that will prepare them well to cope successfully in the 21st century?
Traditional education is going through a crisis worldwide. State agencies around the world are breaking their heads about how to design a suitable education. Every year millions of dollars are injected into educational programs without obtaining the expected results.
The big question remains, what does an ideal education look like?
How to educate for success?
The best way to find an effective option is to go back to the basics and get rid of all the paradigms about education that we have adopted.
Let us ask, then, what are the basic objectives that we want to achieve with a finished education for future generations?
For that we have to forget about the perfect student who is the prototype of traditional education: orderly, diligent, excellent grades, obedient and very skillful in the linguistic and mathematical areas.
While these characteristics are desirable, they only reflect outward behavior that will not necessarily lead to success in life.
An education for success looks deeper. View each person as an individual who has distinctive strengths and abilities that they can develop and exploit for their own good and for the good of others.
Those fortresses have been given to us by God for a specific purpose. From this postulate it can be said that:
An education for success will help the student discover their strengths
Each child's unique gifts and abilities lie within him like rough diamonds that children's parents and teachers must discover and develop in him.
Unfortunately, many times the primary focus of traditional education is on the weaknesses of the students, in order to meet an external demand that will not add value to the child's life. On the contrary, the subliminal message of an education that focuses too much on a student's weak areas is: "You are not as capable as the others."
The sad end result is that the child learns to hate learning rather than embrace it as a tool that will propel him forward.
An education for success will instill a love of learning
Learning should not end when primary or secondary school is finished. Ideally everyone should be a student for life.
To achieve this, a successful education focuses more on the learning process than on its results. Beyond notes or a well-completed task, it is important to look at the student's heart.
Again, you have to forget words like "curriculum", "bouquets" or "content". The child is not a container that must be filled with "x" amount of knowledge. It must be inspired for you to learn on your own.
True learning takes place when a fire is lit inside the student that motivates him to search for information on his own. It is called curiosity. Any other type of education is a waste of time.
How is it accomplished?
A distinction must be made between teaching basic skills such as reading, writing and mathematics and the rest of the vast universe of knowledge, which can never be fully covered in 12 years of school.
Math, reading, and writing skills are acquired with discipline and lots of practice. Instead, knowledge must be acquired with their own motivation and according to the specific interests of each child.
In order not to extinguish this love of learning, it is important to develop the skills so that the child, on his own, can learn the rest, without external impositions.
It is the child who must discover, throughout his life, with passion and in a totally individual way, the understanding of the areas of knowledge such as history, natural and social sciences, geography, chemistry, physics, etc.
Linear or cyclical learning?
In this way learning will be linear, not cyclical. A person who learns with their own motivation will internalize knowledge in a much more efficient way. Your learning will be linear and will not require repetitions.
Instead, a person who learns according to the subject chosen by others, learns cyclically. In traditional curricula, the subject is repeated year after year so that the student captures at least some of the information. This method of education, in addition to being extremely inefficient, is very harmful, since it produces a passive attitude towards learning.
Again, it is important not to insist on our "finished education" paradigm in which the student must master all areas of knowledge. We must honestly ask ourselves, "What is more important?"
• Know a little about everything and lose your love of learning
• Know how to teach yourself and become a student for life
If the love of learning has been cared for as a tender flower that is sprouting from childhood, it will flourish for the rest of the student's life and will provide an education that will open the doors to success in all areas of his life.
