There are many education systems that have been tried, such as grammar, comprehensive, streaming, trade schools, banding and so on. They all have their drawbacks. What usually happens is that we keep changing from one system to another without making much progress.
What we need is a brand-new system. We need an individual system.
Under the present structure, each child is tested by a general system of exams and those who fail are branded as failures. Quite often exams are there, not to encourage you to move forward but to hold you back.
Each child should have his/her personal curriculum based on what he/she wants to study and what career he/she wants to take.
After learning the bare basics, such as how to use a tablet and a calculator, each child should be helped by guidance teachers to plan its curriculum.
One child might like to learn how a mobile phone works, another may be interested in how the television works, and another might be interested in learning a foreign language.
The global education system which should come into existence through the work of the United Nations should, for example, divide all known knowledge into topics and make them available to all schools and universities. Each topic should state what other topics an individual must know to be able to master the topic in question
When a child tells its guidance teacher that it would like to learn how a mobile works, the guidance teacher would tell the child that it needs to study topics 15-30 in physics, topics20-25 in electronics and so on.
In this way, the child would have an incentive to learn and not just learn a subject because somebody put it on the curriculum.
Under the present system, if a person is interested in the study of the law, he has first to study geometry with its theorems and riders. It is much better that such a person would study other law systems practised in other countries.
He should be informed about geometry but he need not be proficient in it to move forward.
In the leaving certificate there should be two different systems of assessment: what topics the student has been taught and knows how to get back to them, if he ever needs to, and what topics he has mastered.
At present, a psychiatrist has to spend years studying general medicine before he/she starts studying psychiatry itself. How much better if, after a brief exposure to topics of general medicine, he spends time studying psychiatry itself.
The class room would be made up of students with different interests; each student studies his/her curriculum using a tablet or a computer. When the student gets stuck he/she asks the advice of the teacher who would guide the student, if the teacher is capable of doing so. If not, the student is referred to a specialist. While waiting for the attention of the teacher the student could play educational games.
Students should socialise together in sports, dance, ethical studies, and so on.
Besides teaching, teachers should also be programmers of topics, curriculum developers for each child under their care and examiners that would certify that a child has covered the topics mentioned in his leaving certificate.
A leaving certificate of a mentally impaired child might state that the child knows how to dress, eat, wash and shop while a certificate of a high achiever might state that he/she has mastered topics 1-20, 50-300 in physics, 1-50, 100-1000 in biology, 1-10,60-200 in chemistry, 1-500 in neuroscience, 1-200 in maths 1-40,90-200 in English and so on. He/she has also been taught about topics 40-60 in history, 1-30 in home economics etc, therefore he/she is capable to work and do research in genetic engineering , Artificial General Intelligence and so on.
Let's hope that schools and universities will become a place of enjoyment for each and every student.
Josephine Gatt-Ciancio
Kalkara