Marketing Musings: Spoon feeding, no thanks!

“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”

E.M. Forster said it best. Foster a love of inquiry alongside a sense of complexity.

We live in highly transaction- based environments; attention spans are less than a mere eight seconds on average. I work in education and schools shouldn’t have to compete with these distractions in order to gain a foothold in the lives of young people. Instead, we need to reframe these “distractions” and invite more interaction from community or business or tech or arts into the realm of education. Make it real. Make learning powerful.?

One of the current crises facing education worldwide, and highly prevalent in the media in the UK at the moment, is that young people from all walks of life are not finding relevance in formal education. They are “missing.” Have they checked out of school? Where are they? What are they doing?

Years ago I wrote a paper for the Inter-American Development Bank when I was based in Quito, Ecuador related to the 50% school desertion rate in Latin America. My idea involved the application of design thinking to education in Latin America. I suggested that we ask ourselves “what would an ideal educational experience look like?” and then go on to engineer that experience. We could look at the entire educational experience – in and outside the classroom – to see where we can improve it; whether it be making travel to and from school safer or giving more autonomy to teachers – the lifeblood of education and learning; or introducing flipped classrooms and student centered learning.?

As humans, we all have the innate ability to create and that’s why learning to see the world, and interact with it, is the most valuable education we can give our young people. By embracing the complexities of life – rather than ask a student to choose between family, friends, economic subsistence, community, or non-conventional goals and aspirations – we can expect higher levels of engagement, participation and interaction with education and schooling and drive down school desertion rates. More importantly, if we can take the lid off potential we enable potential leaders, doers, thinkers, makers, dreamers, mavericks, artists…

It's not "either/or," it may very well be "and." The spoon becomes a metaphor for putting a hold on connections, on bridges that extend towards greater knowledge, on fostering a sense of enquiry and wonder and on establishing an appreciation of beauty in all its forms.

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Esther Clark?is author and outstanding contributor to Forbes, the Global Peter Drucker Forum, and the World Economic Forum. She is the Executive Director of Marketing at Inspired Education (Online Schools) and writes about innovation, strategy, and international education. Follow @ClarkEsther.