Into the Driver's Seat

Education may be the passport to the future, but for all the good teaching out there, it would seem that schools are failing to impart some of the most important life skills, according to one educational expert.

Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group, argues that today’s school children are facing a “global achievement gap”, which is the gap between what even the best schools are teaching and the skills young people need to learn.

This has been exacerbated by two colliding trends: firstly, the global shift from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, and secondly, the way in which today’s school children – brought up with the internet – are motivated to learn.

In his book The Global Achievement Gap, Wagner identifies seven core competencies every child needs in order to survive in the coming world of work.

1. Critical thinking and problem-solving

Big idea: Teaching kids to ask smart questions on their own

A four-year-old asks on average about 400 questions per day, and an adult hardly asks any. Our school system is structured around rewards for regurgitating the right answer, and not asking smart questions – in fact, it discourages asking questions. With the result that as we grow older, we stop asking questions. Yet asking good questions is essential to find and develop solutions, and an important skill in innovation, strategy, and leadership. So why do we stop asking questions – and more importantly, why don’t we train each other, and our future leaders, to ask the right questions starting from early on?"

Learn more:

- http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching?tag=Critical-Thinking

I agree with the fact that recently,students have been 'trained' to give the correct and not ask smart questions.In school ,teachers usually ask us questions and if we answer that correctly, we get praised.For subjects sciences and humanities require a lot of questioning and thinking in order to understand and to learn  more quickly.In my opinion, i think that teachers should give students a chance to ask questions that they have and not go through a topic blindly.If the students is shy to ask, the teacher could create a website so that the whole class can ask questions whenever they feel like and both the teachers and students themselves can answer the questions.This would enable the student to think out of the box to ask and answer questions by themselves 

dice student