Kenitra – Despite being the land of scientific and technological breakthroughs, America is home to the most unhappy people on Earth.
Here, I will not refer to displeasure in vagueness, but rather set an exemplary field which is of concern to myself as an educator. The most cosmopolitan, diligent universities and educational institutions are on American lands: they are sought by students and academics from diverse overseas countries for the great reputation they enjoy over the rest of world’s educational systems.
In TedX lectures, the most well-known lectures platform on the internet, a myriad speakers and education experts give more discontented than appreciated speeches about American mainstream education.
Endless examples from Dan Pink, to Cindy Foley, to Christopher Emdin, all level significant critiquing of the status-quo of the American education system and on the global education systems at large.
The viewer is very likely to believe that American schools—as well as American teachers—are sites and agents of failure and frustration for students’ mental abilities and creative skills. American education experts, or at least a significant portion among them, believe that their education is based on the instilling of information and knowledge into students’ minds rather than utilitarian skills for innovation and relentless creativity.
In the words of Christopher Emdin, the flaw lies with teacher training, which normally accentuates the teaching of conventional pedagogy and bygone teaching-learning approaches; meanwhile, the modern era dictates the learning of “teaching magic.”
Therefore, there is a dire need to free trainees into autonomous way of learning the magic of the job through voluntary attendance of rap concerts, accompanying cab drivers, and so on. These sites, according to Emdin, enable novice and potential teachers to acquire skills and techniques of storytelling, which would eventually enable them to seize the minds and affections of their students and make classrooms beloved places.
In America, people are constantly complaining, criticizing, and preaching novel patterns of more efficient change. Is it really a matter of voids to be filled, or is it a state of continuous intellectual and academic war seeking sensible ideas that envision a common sustainable good?
Even in his candidacy, President Barack Obama adopted the slogan of “change” in his huge electoral campaign, and quite certainly his successors will raise the banner of change in their pursuit to occupy the hottest seat in the country.
In our nations, commonly referred to as MENA countries, no such slogans are chanted and no reform is deemed an urgent matter. The status quo takes decades to change and when people grow aware of the conundrum, no one seems to take the matter at adequate seriousness. There is no change, or at best, it is very slow.
This case of mismatching philosophies accounts for America’s leading position over other countries in many spheres—though in education, some countries have overtaken the American model.
While it seems that Americans are permanently uneasy towards their higher policymaking—a cause for continuous instability and controversy—it actually yields more productive outcomes. It stirs relentless refinement carried out by expert educators in order to better a sector that is very sensitive and instrumental to an individual and a nation’s sustainable growth.
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