The lock down affects every demographic group in different ways, with knowledge workers having to work from home, grandparents are limiting their visits with their grandchildren and kids suffering cabin fever because they cannot play outside.
Amid all this, the United Nations has sounded the alarm that the pandemic affects children the worst of all demographic groups, with large-scale school closures creating a learning crisis globally in more than 188 countries and affecting 1.5 billion children.
In most of the countries, learning from home, has challenged parents, teachers and school systems in terms of how young people are engaged and educated.
While many parents worry about how learning from home affects their children’s performance in future examinations, one should perhaps ask instead how are our children being prepared for the post-corona virus world?
People have a tendency to focus on known risks in front of them, while ignoring the unknown risks that might befall them – even when these are right in front of them.
For many parents, the known risk is the standardized examination a child might well have to take, such as the Grade 12 School Examinations or in UK the International Baccalaureate or O or A levels.
The unknown risk is the question of how well prepared a child is for a future, which is inherently uncertain, and made much more so because of the corona virus.
Over this long weekend, I have been reading two books by an Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, the best-selling author of books like Homo Deus (2015) and Sapiens (2011) and a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem who has explored what humans have done to impact the world since the dawn of history, and what they can do to continue to remain relevant in a world of artificial intelligence and biological hacking and connecting what I have read to the real world.
Yuval predicts that humans will face unprecedented upheavals in the coming years, and that no one knows what to teach young people any longer because no one knows how the world of the future will look.
He cites this as one of the greatest challenges facing mankind today and is obsessed with how to prepare the world, especially our children, for a world of radical transformation and untold uncertainties.
He criticizes schools for being too focused on cramming irrelevant information into the minds of students.
While this may have made sense a hundred years ago – due to the lack of access to books, papers and newspapers – this is hardly the case today in a world where people suffer from daily overload of information.
He has also recommended in his latest book, “21 Lessons For The 21st Century”, that the best 2 things to teach children to prepare them for an uncertain future are reinvention and resilience.
First, he believes schools need to be reinvented to teach reinvention.
He recommends that schools switch to teaching “the four Cs – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity”. He believes that schools should over-emphasize general-purpose life skills – which will help a child deal with the coming changes and uncertainties – over technical skills, which are easily outdated, for example, learning a programming language or how to use a specific computer application.
Secondly, is reinventing thinking.
This form of reinvention requires people to hone the ability to make sense of vast amounts of information and develop the ability to tell the difference between what is important and unimportant. He writes in his book: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”
Then comes reinventing job expectations.
“When you grow up, you might not have a job” is how he starts Chapter 2. This flies in the face of what every parent wants for his or her child. Most of the parents push their children hard because they believe good grades will help their kids get good jobs in the future.
In the “old days”, after we have received our formal education, all we had to do was to go out and find a job. With some luck, we could potentially stay in a trade or profession for the whole of our whole career, be it journalism, law or medicine.
But with rapid disruption and change in the job market today, our kids will have to “invent a job” – something much more difficult to do.
Reinvention will inevitably mean there will be failures along the way.
The inherent uncertainty of these activities will require children to have an ability to keep pushing on, despite facing challenges and setbacks along the way, leading to the second area of focus – the need for resilience.
The work of constantly reinventing and retraining for jobs will create endless upheavals in people’s lives.
Change is stressful. Our children will need deep reserves of emotional stamina and persistence to cope with this new normal.
Yuval writes of the resilience needed: “To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best and feel at home with the unknown.
“Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the first world war. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture.”
It is exactly because you cannot learn reinvention and resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture that it is so important to teach children these important skills.
Parents with children will tell you that kids do not do what they are told. They model what they see being done at home.
I believe most of the parents have taken advantage of their children staying at home and doing their home-based learning (which I would say as confinement!!!) to practice reinvention and resilience.
One of my cousins in Singapore has two boys one 18 and another 15.
He celebrated his first son’s 18th birthday with an offline-online party which involved the family in the flesh and his close friends online.
Since the lock-down started in Singapore, his 18 year old son, has been helping his neighbor’s daughter with additional mathematics and physics via Zoom and is being paid for it.
His 15-year-old son, wonders why teachers seem to be able to teach the same material in 45 minutes via home-based learning, which used to take 90 minutes of class time in the past.
With the time saved from not travelling to school, his 15-year-old son spends his days playing his five musical instruments and mixing electronic digital music on his Mac. He is planning to put his music on a monetization platform like Sound Cloud.
In an attempt to stay fit during this period, his 18-year-old son also does online fencing in their flat. The family has started doing high intensity interval training workouts, thanks to gyms being closed.
His 15-year-old son, told his parents that he wished the lock down could be extended until the end of the year.
These are the efforts done the new generation of kids to succeed in their efforts to reinvent themselves with resilience in the future.
