The Global Learning Crisis

Critical response to TED talk, "The global learning crisis — and what to do about it, Amel Karboul"

When I graduated and left for South America, I had visions of just this sort of thing happening in my midst; I would arrive as the young, eager missionary with zeal and zest for teaching English to the poorest of the poor across Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and they would drain my of all my knowledge on a daily basis only to go on to get degree and doctorates and change the World. Of course, I was in my idealistic bubble at the tender age of 22, thinking that the only way to improve the plight of those in developing nations was to do it all for them. After all, I was completely unequipped to teach at all, having never been trained, and emotionally unprepared for a challenging life sleeping on concrete floors and under tarpaulin sheets for weeks on end, my stomach rumbling from hunger (and perhaps responding to the strange-coloured rice I had eaten 3 times a day, every day). I was the personification of BandAid’s attempt to fix the world by singing a song about Africa having no rivers (despite the Nile being the longest river in the world) or snow (Mount Kilimanjaro’s peak is permanently capped with snow), asking, “Do they know it’s Christmas time?” without considering the high proportion of Muslims in the region.

The partnership described here shows a commitment to what is needed to move forward; organic, home-grown solutions, where support rather than foreign-imposed autocracy reigns. Interestingly, I include the comment from the original video here because, having lived in Vietnam for 3 years, I didn’t see a single lesson with fewer than 50 students, where the teacher received no respect (very little attention) from the masses. Often they had to use microphones to be heard over the talking / shouting / singing. The only education I witnessed in countless visits to schools was this cramming, and endless recitation of facts or times tables. Given that the “Learning Commission” report linked to this TED talk emphasises the skills needed for humans to compete with a robotic workforce in the future, surely this is a sign of poor and pointless education, rather than preparing students for the future?

Here, of course, I only speak from my own experience, but it must be noted that not only do we need kids in school, then in school and learning, we need to ensure they are learning something useful and appropriate. I have often been openly critical of the nature and process of the PISA tests, and here I wonder if they are being used to push ambitious personal agendas rather than make the intended difference. I would be inclined to ask Amel Karboul herself exactly what it was in her education in Tunisia that propelled her toward a successful career in politics; how specific she might be able to be in pinpointing the best parts of her school. The cynic in me wants to point out that with her father having blazed trails as Secretary of State and Tunisian Ambassador to West Germany, she had the sort of start in life that many people who succeed academically and professional have anyway.

Interestingly, my own school is currently looking to expand the use of technology, not to help those children deprived of learning around the world, but as a revenue stream. The IES group of schools which owns and operates St John’s is starting a new initiative called “Home / Online School Tutoring” (HOST) which will enable them to employ teachers who teach through face-to-face video chats. I was surprised to hear that this was being considered as a way to alleviate some of the issues around school attendance for those in remote villages of Amazonas. Do these people have computers, and if so, strong and secure internet connections? If so, then they are technologically perhaps more advanced than many parts of Devon and Cornwall.

Having been so heavily critical here, I must say that overall I am 100% behind this idea and have contacted them to see if someone would be able to speak at our next IES Heads’ Conference, as all of these matters are so important, and I actually believe that fee-paying schools might have a role to play in helping the poor of the world access quality education. Exactly how, I’m still unsure, but at the very least via forms of voucher schemes for those unable to obtain places in state schools domestically, and there is huge scope for expanding programmes of partnership between schools in different countries to support teacher training and development. We frequently host teachers from a sister school in Slovenia here at St John’s in order to help them in their delivery of the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years’ Programme (PYP), and they input to us ways to improve the teaching of second-language lessons here.

More than anything, Amel Karboul and the Education Commission are fighting to raise the profile of learning, and for this alone they deserve support. The world’s problems are not going to be fixed by sending hoards of fresh-faced youths around the world to “teach” or “volunteer” (while charging significant sums for the privilege, by the way) but rather by longer-term, more deeply embedded and organic systematic approaches such as this one.