The Impact of Business on Education
Social media and public crowdsourcing of ideas has become the norm for tasks from deciding if you’re ready to have children, to making decisions on business strategies. We’re not only used to asking input from others but also to being able to give our opinion on just about anything. Given this shift, it’s interesting to ask what the impact will be on future generations and the education system.
This year, a UK newspaper solicited input from primary school children around the country, asking for they vision of the perfect school, a project called “School I Like”. One of the interesting findings of they project was a look at how modern education has changed since the last School I Like was completed 10 years ago.
“It’s clear that schoolchildren are increasingly being listened to”, said the article. “Many let us know about their school councils… and there were examples of young people’s real influence. “‘They do ask what we’d like sometimes’, said one student, who continued with an example. ‘When we were getting a new teacher, we had a lesson from three teachers and we were asked which one we liked the best. They did choose her, so they listened to us.’”
Students now declare that they have rights, which wasn’t heard in 2001. “The children of the modern day are getting more and more rights such as having the right to say their opinion,” said one student who continued to provide his opinion that “you should be allowed to say what you think to the teacher without being criticised or given a detention”.
“Children would be equal to the teachers and opinions would be listened to by everyone,” wrote a student, who expressed the opinion of many others who felt they shouldn’t have to call their teachers Miss, Mrs. and Mr. if they get called by their first names.
A college professor, in a blog for the World Bank, commented on the challenge educators have in keeping up with the advance of social media and crowdsourcing. The writer noticed that ‘innovative’ practices he witnessed over the course of a school year fell under the heading of what he (and the school) considered ‘cheating’.
It’s becoming a difficult line to draw when, in the corporate world, the initiative and management skills required to successfully “outsource” business tasks are lauded. Given that, how do modern teachers explain that copying an answer or having someone else do an assignment is not acceptable student behavior?
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