Education, beyond Covid.

The ongoing pandemic has ravaged lives and destroyed economies. Yet, it fast-forwarded many changes which otherwise would take longer to be brought into effect.

For instance, this pandemic pushed our country's schools to adopt online learning, our government to ponder on online exams and grading, our parents to reconsider the in-house-school system of learning (especially when they are paying for it!).

This very rare opportunity revealed the weaknesses of our outdated education system and should be seized to advance our reflections about the future of our schools.

Back to the diagnosis, our education system is based on memorization of facts and formulas. Schools are organized like factories and the day is broken into periods marked by bells signaling the beginning and the end of each period. Students are presented by the same material and graded by the same scales of achievement.

This system, forged back in the 19th century in the heat of the industrial revolution, with the objective of putting a like-minded workforce on the standardized assembly lines, is now Dead (with the old factories, too!).

Today, Standardization is no longer the rule and conformity should no longer be the desired outcome (Should we start here, Conformity to what?). Entrepreneurship now is all about picking up the mantle of innovation, designing personalized products and services for niche markets.

Today, memorization of facts is no longer necessary (facts are what Google does best!). Reading, writing and arithmetic are supplemented by Creativity, Collaboration, and Critical thinking (the 3C's!), the twenty first century learning system.

The quality of a learning system is no longer putting a label on a product. Its quality is in a new curriculum teaching students to ask the right questions. Teaching them to do so should not be by "instruction" but rather by "construction", by learning through doing (and it's made easier by a computer).

The quality of a learning system is not promoting the best achievers and firing the worst. Learning should be attractive for everyone and "attractive" means entertaining (like you and me enjoying a nice book everyday).

Games fulfill perfectly this need. Researchers have proven that games outperform textbooks in helping students learn fact-based subjects such as anatomy, physics, geography, history, while also improving cognitive abilities, visual coordination and manual dexterity.

The quality of a learning system is no longer the quality of the brick-and-mortar schools. Online learning is the rule from now on and the quality of the new schools resides in their digital culture.

Assessing students' improvement also has to adapt to the online learning. Grades should look more like phases on video games and a lot less like the disturbing letters (F!, C-,..) or numbers (2/20!)...They are children, for the sake of god!

All Students begin their learning journey in the level "avatar" (equivalent to an F), and advance toward levels Master, Expert,... (an A). This forward motion process motivates students and makes them know exactly where they stand.

Barack Obama, once sharing his vision about the education system, said: "This revolution is upon us. Soon we’re going to be able to create gamed-based learning that is so deep, immersive, and totally addictive that we’re going to look back on the hundred-year hegemony of the industrial model and wonder why it ever hung around for so long."

The transition from our now education system to our era education system will be nothing but radical. For the record, it took our country many decades to make schooling (quality debate aside!), first reserved for the clergy and the aristocracy, free to everyone else.

We now know where to invest. Let's learn for the best!