If you, visitor of Earth, followed a ‘normal’ education trajectory, you probably went to primary school around six or seven, pursued three to four years of further education, and may have event gone to graduate school. You ‘graduate’ in your early twenties, ready to start life.
In the twelve to fifteen years of your education, have you ever been taught the fundamental questions of life: How to live? How to be?
I envy you if you have, because I certainly wasn’t. Nor have I met anyone who recalls any deliberate attempts at addressing the fundamental questions in school. It took them a lifetime to become who they are. It’s possible that the teachers didn’t know the answers themselves – they are young and human and still fumbling with their own lives. School is for knowledge. Life inexorably happens after the fact.
The people of Elsewhere consider education to be the single most important human endeavour. It is the pillar that hoisted us, layer upon layer.
But dear earthling, this is not Learning in the traditional way as you know it. In Elsewhere schools are for more than maths and science and literacy. It is to teach us how to be ‘people’, to face uncertainty, overcome disappointment, embrace diversity, and persist in failure. The children of Elsewhere enters the world knowing it will never break them.
The children of Elsewhere learn how to learn. It’s the first subject and the last subject and the constant in between. The world they grow into will be recognizable by their teachers. There will be new technologies, new discoveries and new challenges that shatter pre-existing conceptions of their world and beyond. They will need to learn new skills, develop new attitudes, and constantly reinvent themselves, and they will do so through a lifelong devotion to learning.
The children of Elsewhere learn statistics. They are taught from a very young age that maths is a tool, and they learn how to manipulate it and how not to be manipulated by it. They learn to follow passions and impulses despite – not in the absence of – logic, calculation and reason.
The child of Elsewhere learn economics. They learn to allocate resources (especially their time) in the presence of scarcity. They understand how money works, where it comes from, and the roles they will eventually play in the economy.
The child of Elsewhere learn communication. The world is getting smaller. Soon they will find themselves enjoying a coffee on one side of the world and lunching on the other. From a very young age they’re taught how to get on with others, how to listen and understand, how to articulate themselves, and how to forgive even the most irreconcilable of differences.
In Elsewhere, each child is assigned, over the many stages of her life, several mentors each with distinct qualifications and experience. Technology has enabled foundation skills and knowledge of any subject to be aggregated and curated and intelligently scaffolded, ready to be assembled into a personalized learning journey that adapts to the child’s own aptitudes, interests, and naturally preferred style of learning.
Schools serve as physical gathering spaces for the whole community to discuss, to explore, and to experiment. A serene retreat to cultivate one’s mind. Progression is not based on some arbitrary delineation by age but mastery of the material and completion of projects. Assessment is not some painful hurdle to overcome but a natural, embedded process of learning to assist in the formation of long term memory. Graduation is not some ritualistic conclusion to ones’ studies – learning, after all, is a lifelong process – but a symbolic celebration of adulthood: a declaration that one is now ready to take on the task of changing the world.
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