Johannesburg - The final exam results. That’s what years of education – from primary school to the time you get your degree – boil down to.
However, what’s becoming more apparent is that the marks listed on your report aren’t what an education is all about.
The consensus among education experts who attended this year’s World Innovation Summit for Education (Wise) in Doha, Qatar, was that the global education system needs to evolve and move the emphasis from IQ to other aspects of a child’s life.
Paul Tough, author of the best-selling book How Children Succeed, said: “The conventional wisdom that has governed our thinking about education for the past couple of decades has been misguided.
“We’ve been emphasising the wrong skills and abilities… and we’ve been using the wrong strategies to develop those skills and abilities.
“The idea that a lot of us share is that the one quality that matters most to a child’s success is his or her IQ. I think this idea is behind our global obsession with test scores,” he said.
Tough said educators and scientists whom he wrote about in his book identified a different set of skills which they said mattered as much as, if not more than, IQ.
“These skills include persistence, creativity, curiosity, conscientiousness, self-control and optimism.
“If you talk to an economist they’ll tell you this is a list of non-cognitive skills… psychologists often use the phrase personality traits.
“Educators, and I think the rest of us, think of these as character strengths or just character,” Tough said.
He said one of the barriers that kept these skills from being taken into account by the schooling system was the misplaced notion that allowing children to be creative would be letting them do as they please.
“I think when we talk about making our schools more creative, that can often get interpreted to mean simply giving students more freedom,” Tough said.
“A creative person will tell you creativity has two sides to it.
“First you have to be able to free your mind to go in all sorts of unusual innovative directions, but then you have to be able to train your mind and turn those brainstorms into productive work – a novel or a symphony or a computer programme… and that work often takes years to complete, years of critique and revision and years of helpless failure.
“Helping students learn to develop both sides of that creativity equation, I think that is the most important gift we can give them,” Tough said.
“I think the problem with report cards is not that assessments can’t help, it’s just that those assessments tend to be very narrow,” he said
The Star