omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum
(All the World’s Creatures
As a Book and a Picture
Are to us as a Mirror)
– Alain De Lile

In a recent lesson, a student and I had a discussion on metaphors. The student is and has been a Wushu champion for a while now. After she heard how a metaphor differs from the literal, she was asked to offer a metaphor of her own by completing the sentence, Wushu is…

She thought for a while before saying, Wushu is… work. Not bad at all, I thought.
The world of work has changed in the 21st century. To understand this change, the noble horse, offers a good metaphor. The following are quotes which suggest how a ‘good’ horse ought to be.

“Horses should have great endurance and no habits.”
– Heiho, The Book of Five Rings

“Mark ye the steed swift and tireless, see the dust, spurned by his hoofs, rising in clouds;
Now he swims the river, anon climbs the hill, rending the purple mist asunder;
Scornful he breaks the rein, shakes from his head the jewelled bridle;
He is as a fiery dragon descending from the highest heaven”
– The Hare, Romance of the Three Kingdoms

What is a good horse? Is it one which has “great endurance and no habits” or one which has its own character, sometimes unruly and scornful like “a fiery dragon”?

Imagine you got the opportunity to walk around a school while lessons were ongoing.

You walk past the first class and see students bent over their notebooks, furiously scribbling away what the teacher is writing on the whiteboard. The atmosphere is serious and there is pin drop silence.

You come to another class and the teacher appears to be passively watching with a smile as several students are talking animatedly in raised voices while others are having their own discussions with the students seated next to them. This class is noisy and the atmosphere appears informal.

What is a good class? Which would leave you confident learning is taking place?

Who is a good learner? Is he one who sits up straight and endures in silence even when he does not agree with what his teacher says or keeps questions to himself so he does not disturb the order in the classroom? Or is he the one who is excitable and asks questions often to satisfy his curiosity? Which of these two students would develop competencies for the 21st century workplace?

Let us ask Toffler who wrote the book, The Third Wave. He describes the education system which you and I grew up in as such:

“Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing… This was the overt curriculum. But beneath it lay an invisible or covert curriculum that was far more basic. It consisted and still does in most industrial nations – of three courses; one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work”

Since the Industrial Revolution, to maybe the 1990s, a majority of the workforce needed to be able to turn up for work on time, follow instructions and engage in repetitive work without complaint. Questions were neither necessary nor encouraged if you were a worker.

This is not to say, concepts like critical thinking are inventions of the 21st century for the 21st century workplace. According to scholars such as Jennifer Tan and others who research how to prepare students for the 21st century, critical thinking has always been taught even in the past but only to a very small group groomed for leadership. This small group needed super skills such as critical and creative thinking, effective communication and collaboration. The rest of the student population needed only to follow instructions to be a good worker.

Things have changed. We are in a knowledge-based economy now. While we are still struggling with the digital revolution, artificial intelligence has arrived on the scene. Institutions such as the Future of Life Institution are already preparing for a world where robots are everywhere, by coming up with the Asilomar AI principles.

For this new world, thinkers like Max Tegmark are recommending the following as important goals of education so that workers are not replaced by robots:

a) To train students to interact with others in a socially intelligent way
b) To train students to come up with creative and clever solutions to complex problems
c) To train students to work in unpredictable environments

Can a classroom of 40 students be an unpredictable environment and still allow for learning in an orderly way without devolving into chaos? Can students who have been trained in obedience to be good at enduring instructions without complaint come up with creative and clever solutions?

It is easy to throw stones at teachers who insist on ‘orderly’ classrooms. Have you ever tried standing before a class of 40 intellectually curious students? If a teacher attempts to satisfy each and every one of the 40 students’ curiosity, it might be difficult to complete the planned curriculum.

Being part of a large learning community means one has to set aside one’s curiosity (at least to some extent) for the sake of the rest and the teacher’s rest. This is a necessary trade-off in a classroom setting, be it of 40 or 10 students.

How can we then create a different type of learning environment, one which allows students to lead the lesson according to their curiosity so that they develop into critical thinkers, confident communicators and effective collaborators for the 21st century?

I suspect at least part of the answer lies with class sizes.

What is a good class size?

The Brain Dojo