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Outdated info.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one takes one’s children, the speed at which the 21st Century is unfolding means that whatever they are taught will be outdated within six months.

In Uganda there are annual rituals of P.L.E, O’Level and A’Level exam results being released by the Uganda National Examinations Board, as well as university graduations.

The prominent front-page space given to “P.L.E stars” or the top-performing schools in the Ugandan media, is a commentary on what kinds of people run Uganda’s media and a reminder of the lethargic and exasperating nature of Ugandan society.

Clearly as the Ugandan news media, the government, the schools and parents, we don’t know what we are doing.

Most of us, and perhaps the rest of the world too, still think in terms of a fixed world as it was before the 1990s. You saved money, sent your children to the best possible school within your means and hoped that this “good school” and the child reading hard at school would guarantee their future success.

Then came the 21st Century.
What is the point in spending so much money on school education for our children or in celebrating a first grade or a AAAA score in UNEB exams that one sat in November, when by February when the results are announced, all that information that one read for and passed in November is already obsolete?

What is the point in celebrating a First Class or Upper Second university degree (as much as achievement as that is), when within seven months of the graduation ceremony, the content of that degree has already expired and within a year is irrelevant?

At first came the Internet into general global use in 1994.
Suddenly the world moved from a certain, fixed, slow-moving age into one in which we were assaulted by information.
Alongside this came rapid changes in digital and electronic technology so fast that they are now more than even the best of the world’s best can cope with.

This is why when one listens to or reads business news, every major company seems to be in trouble these days. Not because of incompetent management or poor products but because even for the best of the best, nothing is enough these days to satisfy the market for longer than a few months.

The best example of this continuous up-and-down is Apple. Nobody would have dreamed even six months ago that any question could be raised about this, the world’s most valued company by market capitalisation.

But now there are concerns among financial analysts that Apple’s best-selling iPhone 5 and iPad electronic tablet might either be at their peak, with the only way to go being down, or that these two products will have to struggle for market share in a global smart phone and tablet computer market that is one of the most competitive of any in the world and which is seeing an increasing number of brands targeting an already over-saturated market.

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.

Whether you enroll at Harvard University or Oxford University, at best the textbooks they use for instruction will have been published in the previous year and with this dizzying speed of change, anything that is one year old is already obsolete.

You don’t check your email for two weeks and the next time you open it there is so much of it, it takes a day to read it all.
Cameras that had 10 megapixels in 2007 were quite good for the average user. By 2009, they had gone up to 12 megapixels. In 2010, many cameras now came with 14.2 megapixels, in 2011 it was now becoming 16 megapixels.
By 2014, 24 megapixels will start looking like a basic entry camera.
The training manual I am trying to develop hopes to address this question of education in the 21st Century Internet and information age.

What does a child or a young professional need to know in a world of constant rapid change and a flood of information, more than the ordinary human being can cope with?

The first fact is that no matter who we are, in what field we are trained or what profession we work at, the further we get into the 21st Century the more we shall be writing.

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