Hacking Education

How to help future generations becoming the best version of themselves??

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

What are you going to study at Uni?

What will be your profession??

The usual questions we’re asked when we’re teenagers.?Often times much too difficult to answer for someone who’s right about to finish school and comes unprepared. I remember when I had to choose what to study at Uni. At the end of the last year of High school, after a couple of career counselling sessions, teachers asked me:?

"Well, the time has come..what course are you planning to?enrol?in next year?"?"Mmh...Well, I don't know…still need to think about it".?

Fast forward, a few years later, someone would ask the same question, adapting it to the new context:?

“What job are you going to apply for?"?

The answers to the above questions depend on your personal situation and are likely to fall into 4 main categories:

1. RESOLUTE - You're part of that privileged group of people who is aware of their passion since years and have a clear idea of what to do next?
2. SUPPORTED - You’ve been told by your family or closed ones what you should do (sometimes what they want you to do, with the aspiration of fixing unresolved emotional struggles and regrets)
3. SMART - you have a high degree of self consciousness and had the chance to explore your interests and understand what your passion is
4. DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING -?You have no idea at all

I was in group 4.?A blank sheet. Lots of questions, no answers. For those who experienced the same, I'm sure that is a familiar feeling.?

The education system is ever evolving but in the vast majority of cases it has failed his primary mission: prepare humans to improve their quality of life, achieve happiness and balance, give their contribution to the creation of a better world.?Every student, every person comes from a different family context, background, developed a different degree of self consciousness, lived different experiences.

Instead of focussing on a personalised approach, though, the education system treats everyone equally, pre-selling a templated approach to culture and personal development.?What if that course of study doesn’t fit my aspirations and does’t help me grow, for how I learn and who I am? At the high school we were all participating to the same course, doing the same homework, were taught the same lessons, studied the same books, spent the same time/effort on the same subjects (on average, depending on how much you wanted to study).?At the University chances are that we all had the same course schedule, allocating most of the hours on theory and (when we were lucky) some time practising in work groups.

I believe the education system of the future should be based on significantly different principles from the ones I’ve just described - the most important and formative years of our life should be treated as such and teach us how to create a meaningful future for both ourself and the community we live in.

In my opinion, the recipe for the ideal education system should be based on 5 core pillars:?self awareness, effectiveness, personalisation, relationship & value sharing.

?The educational foundations of tomorrow should be informed by these simple but powerful principles.

Self awareness:

• A psychological assessment -?understanding your character and your sensitiveness can help you grow. Today’s system in most cases treats students as a group, not individuals. Tomorrow’s success, though, will depend on how well one’s talent has been developed and nurtured throughout the process. If we are able to understand who the students are individually, we’ll give them the chance to grow better and improve society as a whole - making it more fair and healthy.
• A strength assessment - focussing on your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Remove what makes you weak and add what makes you strong. Instead of asking students to improve what they’re not good at, we should spend more time in understanding and nurturing their talents, support them in becoming the best version of themselves. Evaluating someone’s performance as an average of different subjects of a pre-determined program which doesn’t take into account people’s skills, doesn’t help us creating stronger humans nor companies choosing the right person for the right position.
• Space for creativity - letting the natural inclinations and feelings come out. Today’s schedule is characterised by the urge to perform better, sooner, longer. Efficiency and high level performance are considered as a requirement for assessing the student / worker's value. There is little space to cultivate emotions and creativity, which comes from intuition, calmness, time to connect with the inner self. The creative mindset is fostered and valued mainly in Art Schools or Artistic academies. What if we introduced creative thinking into economics, law, political science for example? What would we be capable to achieve with students (then workers) that take their time to think and come up with ideas that can not only get the job done, but also innovate how we do things, for the better?

Productivity & Effectiveness:

• The usage of the digital and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is at the centre of discussion as it is perceived as dangerous and might disrupt the job market as we know it today. Let’s consider it for a moment as an alley and put it at work to help us and improve the quality of learning instead of considering it as a competitor to our knowledge. A.I. could support our education system in shaping a learning program based on one’s skillset and psychological assessment, creating exercise and study programs that are customised to student’s needs and learning styles. It would ultimately help us maximising the output, saving on the input - i.e. effort needed from individual teachers to understand one’s needs and create a personalised program, as that could be done by the machines with ad hoc virtual assessments. The teacher’s role would gradually evolve and include emotional development within its responsibilities.
• Interactive media - a dynamic and cross-channel approach to studying, blending videos, books, audio teaching. Assessing the learning persona, we should customise the way we intake information and ensure we're leveraging the most effective way to learn. With the goal of become more efficient and productive, saving time for life experiences -?Study less, Study better, Live more. This approach taps into the previous point and it expands its reach, supporting the personal needs in regards not only to what we study but also to how and with what means.
• A practical approach - studying the theory does only half of the job. Notions are truly assimilated only once they're put in practice. Private schools and universities do it since a while, but this approach is not that common in public schools / universities. Combining practice with theoretical learning is key to truly owning a skill. A bunch of notions, even when well exposed to a professor during an exam, do not make us an expert at something. And not even close to being able to apply what we have just learnt. We start understanding what we’re explaining when we put it in practice through use cases, group works, workshops, concrete applications. Pray what you preach, they say.

Personalisation:

• Custom exercises, resources, books based on your personal academic career path. Having a personalised plan means customising the way to acquire knowledge (how we learn). Based on the study preferences and objectives, people attending the same faculty should study on different resources and practice more in different areas than the other students. A.I. could help us doing that, through a digital dashboard that tell us how far we are from our objective, what we should study more to achieve our goal and what exercises to do and what tests we should pass to get there. Everyone’s path could be different with the goal of maximising learning and outcomes.
• Personal projects - if all of us were given the task to develop personal projects earlier in our academic career, tapping into our passions and interests, we would put our knowledge in practice earlier and develop the ability to master our skills, knowing ourself better and ultimately improving and shortening the learning path, having fun doing it.

Relationship & Value Sharing

• Multicultural experiences - in a world that is everyday more global, sharing learnings with others is key from both a personal and educational perspective. Getting in touch with different cultures would give us more tools to share experiences, learn from others and become better team players. International programs like student exchanges all around the world go into this direction and should be developed even further as an essential part of everyone’s educational program
• Understanding different cultural backgrounds - multicultural environments, diversity and inclusion are key to improving our future and should be taught. The more we learn it while we study, the better organisations we will be able to build. Understanding everyone’s context, background, culture, strengths and limits would allow students and future workers to empower each other. Fostering empathy will create a better person and consequently a better professional?
• Learning how to communicate - it is well known that people who know how to communicate effectively can get where they want, even when they are technically less prepared. Communication helps not only to achieve goals, but also to work better with peers. Few universities and schools put enough emphasis on this though. Communication courses, public speaking exercises in a safe environment, express our thoughts and feedback to the others play a core role in shaping our personal and professional future and should be learnt at schools.?
• Developing soft skills. To sum up most of the points of this section in two words - soft skills are one of the most undervalued subject in education courses. The system we live in can improve not through more sophisticated professionals, but thanks to better people who know how to deal with each other, understand humans needs and behaviour and drive together toward the same goal. You could develop the most disruptive software or build the highest growing business in the world, but if you don’t know how to deal with people internally (in the company, with employees) and externally (with customers, investors) you’d not be able to create a business that last. Students should learn the importance of soft skills early enough to make a difference in the world of tomorrow.?

By taking the above actions, we’d be able to not only to improve the education system, but also achieve some of the most important objectives of our existence:

• Increase self awareness and self knowledge
• Increase personal satisfaction and sense of purpose
• Have a more fulfilling life, be happier and influence others
• Create more passionate, productive, achieving humans

We could hack the system by investing in a sustainable and engaging?development of our skill's mastery. We would stop investing in a pension plan and start investing in our future.

Do you have any ideas to add to this list? Would love to hear yours.?