Johannesburg, 10 Nov 2021
If you refer to someone as a stoic, it means they embrace a less-is-more philosophy. But the actual name has nothing to do with such an outlook. Instead, it refers to an arched porch. The stoics picked up their name from the Stoa Poikilē - painted porches - where they assembled for their education.
Back then, even schooling in the street was worthwhile if it meant gaining more knowledge.
Education is an irreplaceable part of progress. While it's often dryly remarked that education exists to create taxpayers, education represents humanity's struggle against adversity. For example, cities came into being not as natural evolutions of agricultural villages, but instead to help expand and scale collective knowledge. Education stops us from having to keep reinventing the wheel.
"The fundamental purpose of education has to do with the survival of the human race," says Kapil Jaggeth, digital education firm Torque IT's Managing Executive. "Education has helped us become a superior species by learning and sharing knowledge. Today, education is what helps us improve civilisation. It's one of our greatest inventions."
Yet, education has long been a puzzle. If you complain that education isn't effective, you're not alone - or even early to the notion. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the last of the ancient Stoic philosophers, often lamented that he was fortunate to be home-schooled and not exposed to Rome's notoriously ineffective public schooling. That was almost 2 000 years ago, and we haven't stopped complaining since.
Can education realise its worth?
Yet education has evolved from something reserved for the male offspring of wealthy families to a fundamental right for everyone. It's one of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and is acknowledged as the key to every nation's future. That concept is even more relevant today as we shift into knowledge economies. But such needs aren't magically solving education's problem.
"The intention of teaching has not changed, and it will not ever change," Jaggeth explains. "The intention of teaching is to make sure whatever I teach you is sticky. It sticks in your brain, stimulating you. But if anything, the opposite tends to happen. The guys who want to learn and are interested in the topic, they become good students. And the ones struggling, they become bad students. And then we end up with bad teachers who only focus on the good students. Now you have a self-fulfilling situation where education only helps the people who probably needed the least help."
If education is to improve, it's not about education itself but how we deliver its content. The purpose of education will never change. But the delivery can - and this is the potential that we have in front of us today.
Jaggeth provides an example through his own learning experience: "When I was studying at school, we used pen and paper. We learned a whole syllabus throughout the year, with some tests to see we're on track, and then we completed a major exam at the end of the year, trying to skim all that information in one or maybe two papers."
Years later, he enrolled to study for his MBA and received a very different experience involving digital technology: "I had to use a tablet, and I'll admit at the start I thought it wouldn't work. But it did. But more important things happened. Instead of major exams, we had many small ones that stayed directly relevant to what we were learning at the time. We could vote anonymously via an app on different questions, which increased participation and led to more nuanced discussions. We could use smartphones to have access to our teachers and fellow students. IT was an entirely different way to access and contextualise what we were learning."
How edtech can enhance education
Digital edtech (education technology) has been around for decades. Classrooms have had access to computers since the 1980s, and new creative ways to teach - whiteboards, projectors, televisions and laptops - crop up across the modern education timeline. But technology for the sake of it doesn't improve education where it counts: making knowledge sticky and matching students' learning needs.
"Technology makes sense in education if it affects how we deliver content, and if it makes the environment more engaging. I believe this is what the pandemic era brought home. We can invest a lot of hope in technology, but we have to be more critical about how technology changes education. It's not just about enhancing the classroom - it has to go deeper than that."
A good education is about engagement - how do we use technology to engage students better? The best examples can be found among institutions that offer short courses for IT certifications and skills.
"It's an interesting mix - you typically have students who want to be here and you have teachers who are technology-savvy," says Jaggeth. "So it's easier to see the value or lack of value a technology-based teaching method can create. For example, do you know which technology became an excellent teaching tool during the pandemic? WhatsApp. While the pandemic reduced access to physical resources and online education exploded, WhatsApp enabled people to blend the two. They had access in a real sense to lecturers, not just an e-mail address that could take a day or two to get a response."
For all the problems it caused, the pandemic finally revealed how technology and education could come together. It's not about Zoom calls or online exams. Those are pieces of the solution that can be helpful or harmful depending on how they are used. But we can identify the folly of technology in education: if it doesn't help make learning more sticky, it's not working.
Nor can any single technology achieve that. But the right combinations of edtech can make a huge impact - not just in the classroom, but any form of training or knowledge sharing.
"Technology softens the boundaries of time and space. You don't have to all be in the same classroom or always access your education at set times. The future of education isn't all virtual, but we now know that it's not just a place and a set way of doing things. Modern education has an opportunity to come full circle to why education exists in the first place."
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