Education for Humans

Currently, education is not inclusive or equitable for all. There is a very clear and persistent major problem in the schooling success of children from hunter or forager backgrounds, from indigenous backgrounds, and from other societies who retain their traditional ways of life: most of these children never finish school, failure is very high, motivation is very low. However, the problem not only affects children in the third world; there is a surprisingly high proportion of Western/first-world children who also struggle or fail in school, or are abandoned by the school system. The reason for the persistent lack of success by these children is because the Western education system is based on methods that are totally incompatible with the natural learning style of humans, such as:

1. segregation of children into classes made of same-age groups,
2. imposed learning,
3. following a rigid schedule,
4. one person talking, and
5. demanding children to sit quietly without moving.

In contrast, children in both Western and non-Western settings learn from older and younger ones, with their own initiative, at various times and seasons, from many people, through participation and interaction. The costs of not solving this problem are: increasing disparity between young people’s access to jobs and university degrees, aggravating existing racism/discrimination between populations based on their school success, and loss of diversity in the ways of learning found across humans.

My solution is to make education become inclusive and equitable by aligning the education system more with the variety of humans’ natural learning styles, and therefore to enable effective learning for everyone, regardless of their background. The solution is to break down the assumptions of the Western education system which originated in a need for factory workers in Victorian times. To start at the basic level, schools can incorporate practices that are documented by anthropologists, sociologists, ethnographers, archaeologists about the most effective learning styles of people for different skills. Some of these practices are already proven to be highly effective when applied in Western schools, such as Peer Tutoring, mixed-age classes, outdoor classrooms, and adjusting the school schedule to allow children to participate in important cultural events. These already validated examples should be more widely adopted to transform the whole education system at the policy level. The potential impact of my solution is to foster better learning for all and therefore to give every child equal access to education, no matter where in the world they live or how they live.

There are some existing solutions to the problem of making education inclusive and equitable for all, particularly the children who are struggling in the Western school system, and the children from traditional societies. Some projects are focusing on training teachers in African villages to improve their teaching style, with good results. The Free School system, founded by Peter Gray in the USA decades ago, based on learning of hunter-gatherers, has proven that a radical change in the education system is very effective in sending children to university, as well as in helping children who failed in the Western education system (for example, dyslexic children who could not read in the conventional school by age 12 learned how to read fluently in a Free School, thanks to the self-directed nature of this school model). Many schools already have success with mixed-age Peer Tutoring, which is a key learning point in forager populations. Steiner and Waldorf schools also apply some concepts like free choice of classes, learning through participation, and short-term projects. The chances for this idea to be implemented successfully are very high, as many schools already implement some of the concepts with great success. However, schools are limited by the national requirements. The next challenge is for educational authorities to accept a wider range of proven effective educational methods. Another significant challenge is teachers who often refuse to use new teaching methods. Therefore, it will be important to introduce these concepts directly at the teacher training stage. The trainings for teachers who have forager children or indigenous children in their classes (such as many towns in the USA and Canada with Native American children) should especially focus on the learning styles known for the particular tribe or group of those children; this will require collaborations with anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnologists.