Towards 2035: The School of Tomorrow
The text of this article © Copyright 2005 by Adnan Ashraf.
2 December 2005, Lahore, Pakistan
“Towards 2035: The School of Tomorrow” was staged in Islamabad and Karachi earlier this week. The final day of the international conference took place in Lahore at the Pearl Continental hotel. Beginning with a recitation from the Holy Quran, the conference featured a full day of presentations and discussions on the future of education by scholars, educators and administrators, including MIT Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky, Quaid-e-Azam University Physics professor Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, journalist Jonathon Power, Artificial Intelligence researcher Dr. Roger C. Schank of Northwestern University, learning activist Manish Jain of Shikshantar, and Robert Harding, an Assessment Expert from the University of Cambridge, among many others. Organized by the Beaconhouse School System, which is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year, the Lahore conference also offered delegates an opportunity to visit virtual reality and distance learning installations and to participate in interactive learning sessions on the Reggio Emilia Way for teaching young children and on learning with technology.
The core questions that the conference addressed include:
Do schools at present promote real learning?
What should schools be teaching to prepare students for tomorrow, and how? Are exam results the most reliable measure of achievement, and are there better ways to assess students?
What will the role of teachers be in 2035?
What role can technology play in learning?
What is the role of the community in effective learning?
Does the physical structure of classrooms and schools need to evolve?
How do tradition and other vested interests make it difficult to reform schools?
Indeed, should schools — as we know them — even exist?
The audience was entertained by Dr. Roger C. Schank’s multimedia presentation, in which he recommended that “what we should be teaching is arguing, writing, building, planning, reasoning, and designing.” Further, he said that “instead of courses, we should have goal-based scenarios,” and asked “Whatever happened to learning by doing?” Among the problems he identified was the classroom itself. “As long as we have them (classrooms), we’ll keep on teaching courses in them.” Dr. Schank defined the role of the professor as one that entailed assigning tasks to student-groups and then evaluating them, stating that “experience is what matters,” and that “education means learning to think critically in complex situations that have no clear solutions.” Dr. Schank offered that schools should teach abilities instead of subjects, that educators should not be giving lectures on subjects but giving experiences that test students’ abilities, and concluded that the school of the future is “a set of possible experiences to choose from,” and that the computer is just a “Trojan Horse” introducing the education of the future.
Chief guest Khalid Maqbool, the governor of Punjab, stated that the government is commited to promoting the private sector schools, and that there were many questions that had to be addressed:
Who is designing the curriculum?
What should be in it?
How are we teaching in classrooms?
How do we train teachers?
How can we help children to learn morality and ethics, and not just religious ethics?
Should we be teaching children to compete and win or to co-operate and learn?
He added that the government is spending more money nowadays, moving towards a more generalized, internationalized curriculum.
Jonathon Power discussed Samuel Huntington’s concept of a clash of civilizations and noted that in Lahore he had visited a madrassa for the first time; and opined that, though its students spend too much time studying theology, its reality and that of the gracious individuals who showed him around, was far-removed from the stereotypical hotbed of “the clash of civilizations.” He suggested that current Western thought should be studied in madrassas as it was in Islamic institutions during the Middle Ages.
Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy began his talk with the words “Science is important,” pointing out that in Muslim societies its importance had fallen sharply since its glory days and suggesting that the October 8th earthquake in Pakistan has changed that. He bemoaned society’s ignorance of the scientific method, an ignorance that has had devastating consequences not only in Pakistan, but in the U.S. also. “Science is scorned, misrepresented, feared, hated in our country. We don’t understand it; we don’t want to understand it.” He observed that science is nonetheless taught because there is a huge gap between Pakistan and India and the rest of the world. “The search for truth is rooted in logic and experiment and this aspect is totally missing when science is taught in Pakistan. It’s just a bunch of dry facts that don’t provide stimulation.” He lauded the scientific method as a universal standard, stating that “it is this universality that we must stress in the school of 2035.”
In the evening, Professor Noam Chomsky appeared from Eastern Massachusetts via a live video conference and concluded the proceedings by drawing the audience’s attention to Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His speech was frequently interrupted by technical complications. However, he was able to answer several questions, including one posed by Kasim Kasuri, the current Chief Executive of Beaconhouse, who asked what the main trend in primary and secondary schooling would be in the future. Professor Chomsky replied that he didn’t see schooling at that level to be that much different from university education, advising that “it should stimulate the natural curiosity of children,” and that “if the school wants to produce true, fulfilled human beings capable of facing the very serious problems of the world,” it should teach students to discover.
This article was written for DAWN newspaper. It was not published. The views of those quoted in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of the author.
Copyright 2005 by Adnan Ashraf.
