The best education for your children

Outdated info. No matter which school in the world one takes one’s children, the speed at which the 21st Century is unfolding means that whatever they are taught will be outdated within six months.

Be it sms or entering terms and queries into Internet search engines or writing email, office reports and filling in online forms, banking, legal and other official documents, writing is now something art and science students now do in equal measure.

So writing well and clearly is now becoming more important than ever.

Then, because we are going to spend the rest of our lives in the online world, the second feature of a “relevant” education in the 21st Century will have to be a fairly detailed knowledge of Internet security and other technical details.

The online world is highly technical and one small mistake can cost you your money, reputation, opportunity, data and time. So there is no way around this. We shall have to become knowledgeable about the way the Internet works, especially in how to protect ourselves from fraudsters, pedophiles, crooks trying to uncover our passwords, distinguishing real email from “spam” and many more such matters.

The third feature of the world of the 21st Century is tied in with the first two: We are going to live with information in mega quantity. You make the mistake of not being in touch with the news, the latest technology or global trends for three months and you immediately fall back by two years in your competitiveness.

And because the Internet is a universe of ever-expanding knowledge, with no end in sight yet we only live within a fixed 24 hours each day, the other feature of true education in the 21st Century will be how to find what one is looking for (or ought to be looking for) out of millions of websites.

Already being on the Internet feels a little like living in a library all day and night. We are constantly surrounded by more books, newspapers, links, posts and uploads than we can possibly read or attend to.
Most of what we encounter on the Internet is irrelevant, petty, fleeting, shallow or inaccurate.

Mental concentration
Therefore, the ability to concentrate mentally will become increasingly vital in the rest of the 21st Century. One will need to be able to discern credible sources from fluff, accuracy from opinion, what’s valuable from what’s time wasting.

As the US-based Christian magazine, the Philadelphia Trumpet, put it is last year, the most important application or “App” we have is not the many Apps we are constantly downloading onto our smart phones and tablet gadgets but our minds. The human mind is the most important App in the world.

Training this mind to think creatively, focus, concentrate, reflect and digest all the tons of incoming data that assault it day in, day out, will be more than ever the role of true education in the 21st Century.

The best possible education, then, in this 21st Century of ever-changing world political alliances, constantly evolving electronic gadgets, too much information, stiff competition in world business and time getting more and more difficult to find, is not that which we get from MBAs, certificates, diplomas, O’Level or A’Level pass slips, but it is that found in a state of mind.

It is in the direct education of a mind in the fundamentals of thought, attention to detail, the ability to sieve through heaps of information, constant reading and curiosity about the world around us.
That is the training manual and technique I’m trying to work on right now.

timothy_kalyegira@yahoo.com