We could use a different approach to technical education

At the beginning of the week I was talking to my coworker Patricia about how education is approached in our country. She coordinates a regional program aiming to strengthen technical education in different fields, like math, science, industry-applied technology and school management. The program’s various groups in different regions of the country do not work directly with students; they work with teachers and school principals. The aim is to train educators and hence improve technical education by setting higher standards.Patricia was telling me how Gabriel and Alejandro, the head tutors in the school management area, have a liberal approach to education, and what a challenge it was to introduce these principles in technical education.

“They want to empower the student, work with the previous knowledge they have. You say this to an engineer, and he will frown and shake his head. Engineers think of their science as hard knowledge that cannot be approached through discussion. The problem goes even deeper: It originates in the conception of one perfect student that all alumni should try to live up to. This is not just a viewpoint from engineers, but from almost all actors in the educational system. Nowadays we are trying to uproot the concept of the model student, and we are working to introduce subjectivity into educational approaches,” she told me.

I knew what she was talking about.

Sergiu, a classmate from Berlin, gives a presentation on a sculpture in Florence

Doing my master’s in Berlin was the first time I encountered liberal education. It has many principles, but in general terms, we could put it this way: There are no professors, there are only classical texts; knowledge is gained through discussion and questions. A typical day started with a lecture from a faculty member, who gave his or her interpretation of the chapters we had previously read, and opened the field for questions and discussion. Then we would go on to our seminar group and discuss the text and our ideas on it. This was the method for core courses. For electives, we only had seminar groups. Furthermore, there were no exams – only essays.

This approach to education really changed me irreversibly. I strongly believe it develops critical thinking in students, a capacity to question everything (with a proper argument), and not just take in anything from whoever is saying it. It is about building skills for having rich discussion with well-developed ideas. And it appeals above all else to the students’ creativity, while at the same time it empowers them by valuing their capacity to reason and their previous knowledge.

Thinking of what Emmy said in her entry, that education in Kenya kills creativity, I believe it could strongly be related to how theoretical learning is approached. This is, I believe, similar to the challenge I was talking about with Patricia: How to introduce a liberal approach to education in hard science teaching. I think it’s not about denying the value and strength of theories, but, rather, finding a way to make the student aware of his or her own capacities and encourage them to use these as the principal motive to acquire knowledge.

Maria's mother grading papers

I was having breakfast with my parents on Sunday. My mom is an English teacher, and she was grading papers. She asked me to take a look at some writing by her students.

“Do you think I’m being too demanding? This is for CAE [Cambridge English: Advanced] level,” she asked.

I pondered several things and exchanged ideas with her. It was during this conversation that I recalled how exactly I came to write in English as I do today.

When I found myself attending classes in Berlin, in an international college, writing philosophical essays of around 2,000 words, I realized I didn’t have a solid base of knowledge on how to write an essay. I had to learn how to structure complex ideas and elaborate thoughts by myself, through writing and feedback from faculty members. There’s a way in which, in Argentina, high standards in learning do not come from a joint effort, a socially sanctioned approach to providing good quality education. Instead, the standards come from individual initiative. It is by and large a common thing to hear people say: “I was lucky: in seventh grade, I had a wonderful language teacher,” or, “I didn’t have a hard time in math in college because for the last two years of high school my teacher was very demanding.”

In Argentina, when I was finishing high school, the system was 6-3-3: six years of primary school, three years of pre-high school, and three years of proper high school. In this last bit you had to choose an orientation, so it could be the case that your classmates and you had to part ways, and you found yourself in an entirely new group of people.

When preparing lessons, teachers set the standards by themselves

I remember doing grammar exercises during class. Some would take part and others would be at a complete loss. So the teacher would ask, “Who was your language teacher in pre-high school?” This is when you found out that some teachers stressed writing style, while others focused on grammar exercises, and, finally, some others made literature the priority. If you were lucky, you got a good basis in grammar and learned how to write properly and express yourself. This phenomenon that took place within the same school gets multiplied when you meet others your same age in college, who come from the provinces. Then the knowledge gap is wider than when you compare teenagers educated in Buenos Aires.

There is no single system that unifies educational standards. Even though teachers follow curricula, they may not emphasize one specific thing or another, and the rest is up to you. I sometimes get the feeling that either these topics in curricula are too general, or they are not properly evaluated at the end of the term. In any case, more often than not, you are left alone in making efforts to reach further.