Estate Living Digital Publication Issue 8 August 2015 | Page 63

c u r r ic u l u m Education is in need of resurgence, not resuscitation We often hear how education has become unexciting with lifeless educators teaching zombie-like students, so how do we resuscitate our failing educational system? To resuscitate our education system would mean bringing it back to the state it was before it became dormant. The system needs more than resuscitation; it needs resurgence, which overturns the status quo and encourages the development of something better. This does not mean discarding the three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic), but instead, using them to help incorporate emotional intelligence and social awareness. There is an assumption that EQ will not get learners a job when they leave school but our fastpaced and constantly changing world has made the job market unpredictable. The options for school-leavers are far greater, approximately 15 times better than their parents’ generation, but they still face different and more complex challenges. A study conducted by McKinsey & Co – a multinational management consulting firm– looked at how the world’s most improved school systems keep getting better and found that the long journey of transformation from ‘poor to fair to good to great to excellent’ involved integrating three aspects, including identifying the current position or ‘performance stage’ of the school system known, as the status quo. A set of interventions are then necessary in order to achieve the desired improvements, referred to as the ‘intervention cluster’ and these need to be adapted to the historical, cultural, political and structural factors within the school. Curro’s schooling system is based on an appraisal of the status quo of the education system at the time and our set of ‘interventions’ has resulted in DESIGN & DECOR 59