As they are being forced into 24/7 isolation with their children, getting the hang of what it’s like to be a teacher for the Z Generation – parents all around the world become increasingly aware of the fact that today’s education system does not work for today’s children.
The writing has been on the wall since the beginning of the millennium, but the Corona crisis definitely speeded things up. Now parents and educators are finally realizing what the experts have been saying all along: while the current education system is not very different than what it was like 20 years, even 50 years ago – but today’s children are VASTLY different then what their parents were.
Who are today’s children?
The Generation Z children are fast-thinkers with restless minds and restless thumbs, as they are living and breathing technology and visual stimulators. The low-tech, memorization-based education system just doesn’t cut it for them anymore. The world around them is changing at an alarming pace, there’s so much for them to learn, to do, to experience – they want it all, and they want it NOW, no time to waste!
In a year from now, the world will become more tech-dependent than ever before. Many people will find themselves unemployed and un-needed as technology is being enhanced and extended to meet all of our needs in every area of our lives during the Corona Crisis. We are on the verge of an accelerated global change, and today’s children are already in urgent need for a different approach to their education, so a good question to ask, especially now, would obviously be…
“How am I going to prepare my child for the future?”
Let’s take a look at those who already ahead of this technological revolution. This new successful generation, mostly associated with places like Silicon Valley, is an extraordinary example of adaptation. These bright and brilliant young entrepreneurs are changing the world we live in, using their constantly-increasing knowledge of computer sciences, math and philosophy integrated with high curiosity, ethics, values, and leadership. These are, indeed, talented people – and their cooperation of talents is their secret to success.
The world seeks and richly rewards these talented people – people who can be fast learners in any field, who can be exceptionally creative, innovative, and productive.
You might think that the gift of talent is a matter of “whether you were born with it, or you weren’t” – but the truth is that talent is actually acquired, and we proved it. By researching “geniuses” throughout history, we found there are 4 essential fundamentals at the root of what we call “talent” – All of them are as learnable as the ABC’s.
These are the 4 fundamentals of talent:
- Pattern recognition is the ability to recognize emotional, intellectual, or physical patterns and how they are being built and connected. This is the intelligence element of talent. This is what an infant does naturally to mimic a language and behavior.
- Pattern design is when the elements of the patterns are taken and connected in a set order to do or create something – whether a behavior, an insight, a product, a service, or behavior. This is the creative part of talent – the breaking of patterns into parts and making new combinations by duplication and change
- Analogy means techniques that help people to see the relationship between one pattern and another in their lives. The learner links the new experience to a previous one by saying “this is like…” This technique produces fast learners. Basically, this is what enables us to understand something in one area and apply it to another – such as when a concept in a computer game is adapted to learning.
- Real-time composition (RTC) fuses the recognized and designed patterns and finds the common denominator. This is when miracles are happening inside our mind and we produce new ideas.
Training the new generation for the future
When Opher Brayer initiated The Stages Academy program in 2007, more than 2,000 children from various socio-economic groups in the Czech Republic were introduced to the process of acquiring multi-disciplinary talent as well as the Innovators mind.
A research we conducted with hundreds of children between the age of 6-12 have shown that 5-7 minutes of our thoughtfully-designed, talent-building games per day helps children not only to use analogy from one field to the other, but also to enhance their creative thinking, improve their grades at school and even make it easier for them to cope with attention deficit disorders.
All that, alongside developing self-confidence and multidisciplinary talent, will definitely aid them and your children in the future, when machines and AI technologies will take up every job that doesn’t require talent.
Don’t wait for the future – prepare for it!
Stay home, stay healthy, stay safe – but don’t wait for the future to catch your children unprepared for it. Enable them to develop their talent now, while you still have the time to affect the way they learn, think and create, before they go back to school… By then, it might be too late.
Wishing you all best regards,
Opher Brayer, Maya Liberman, and the Stages Team