AltSchool’s network of micro-schools is a disruptive model of education which aims to accelerate our thinking about learning. Its aim is simply to nurture the rise of a creative class. How do we future proof the workforce of Trinidad and Tobago? Globally, sixty-five per cent of today’s students will be doing jobs which do not exist as yet. Humans have imagined this entire world into being. Schooling must ignite the slow fuse of the imagination. The old doctrinal emphasis on selective retention, convergent thinking and deductive reasoning must give way to guessing, approximation, risk taking and divergent thinking. A vibrant imagination is the most important quality students can take into their lives after school. But it is “not an ‘outcome’ that can be ‘delivered,’” “nor taught in a didactic way and it is not the content for a module,” according to Tony Little, former Headmaster of Eton College.
The future of work is expecting a connecting agent– someone who can make unusual connections, associations and combinations. This is precisely why Finland is focusing on collaborative classroom practices, where learners work with several teachers simultaneously during periods of phenomenon-based project studies. In this new setting subject boundaries have become blurred. Subject silos have been dissolved- releasing the imagination. Talent is the decisive source of competitive advantage. But it is not a commodity. Creativity comes from our citizens and this means that it is the people who are the greatest resource in an age of liquid-capitalism.
The implacable grandeur of our planation past is a pedestal in gilt frame from which we must affirm another life. To live in nostalgia among the ruins of that life is a sin if ever there was one. Life inside the ruins of our past is unlike our eyes touching the outline ahead of us on the road that we have only just begun to walk. With our thoughts, we bring our worlds into being. Liberty is nothing but a chance to go beyond our best and to be better. Going further must be our aim, at this crucial time in our liberty. The future is open to suggestions. Education for Liberty is- one suggestion
