Campaign
GerHub's 4th year anniversary
Date
04/22/2020
What We Learned
From Education?
When we started as an organization, education was not a key pillar of our organization like it is today. However, as we implemented our built and product development projects, we came to quickly realize that in order to have the type of impact we envisioned we would need to invest extensively in people.
Since launching our Education for Innovation Program in partnership with Nexon Foundation, we have been educating ourselves about what’s happening in the field of education globally in order to inform our actions locally. There is an ongoing global debate over the role and purpose of education. We are exploring here how global developments are shaping the future of education, where our country stands, and what we believe must be done.
What is the future of education?
The world is moving away from a conventional interpretation of education as the demand for and concepts about education changes over time. For instance, while literacy was a priority in the 20th century, literacy in technology has become the new norm for the 21st century. Since the dawn of the 21st century, advancements in technology have altered our lives faster than ever before and will continue to do so at an even faster pace. As the world changes at a dizzying rate, we are left scrambling to adjust to the uncertainty and complexity of the times.
In an ever-changing environment, it is much more important to have the ability to adapt and learn new skills than to have mastered a single hard skill. As a result, education is moving towards placing emphasis on developing 21st Century skills (the 4 Cs--Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration) and lifelong learning skills. Education is no longer about spending a certain number of years in a system to become highly skilled in a given topic. Instead, it is much more about being able to constantly learn and reinvent oneself when needed.
The Mongolian context
Mongolia has a strong educational foundation with a high literacy rate. Perhaps more importantly, parents place the utmost importance on the education of their children from a young age. However, an important question to ask is “Is the education being received by our children properly preparing them for the future?” The education system in Mongolia is heavily skewed towards math and other related fields while diminishing the importance of other subjects. While recent initiatives have attempted to shift to a student-centric style of education, our education system is founded on a soviet-style, teacher-centric model. The teaching approach still focuses more on rote learning where subjects are memorized rather than analyzed and understood in a meaningful way. Most students graduate with inadequate language skills with poor reflective writing or critical thinking abilities in both Mongolian and foreign languages. At the same time, due to the lack of an ineffective investment in the public education sector and rapid population growth in Ulaanbaatar, class sizes have become overpopulated, making it impossible for teachers to focus on individual students. The average pupil-teacher ratio in primary schools in Mongolia is over 30 pupils, while the global average is around 23 with the best performers just over 10 pupils per teacher. Moreover, psychological and career counseling is an emerging need but counselors are not professionally trained and often have other priorities rather than closely working with and guiding students. Extracurricular activities in schools are mostly sports-related and options outside of school provide only a handful of topics such as English, math-related subjects, and leadership skills. The challenges go on and so forth.
At the same time, today’s Mongolian youth is much more active and socially oriented than previous generations. Children and youth are longing for opportunities that allow them to learn from practice and be more socially impactful.
Gerude: Education for Innovation
As a response to these challenges, we developed our flagship Education for Innovation Program that aims to nurture creative problem solvers who are empowered to tackle society’s issues and are prepared for a future that is uncertain and complex.
Our students learn various skills through hands-on, real-time social projects to develop essential 21st-century skills while deepening their knowledge about the world around them. Through their social innovation projects, our students learn to think critically and identify problems, offer creative solutions, collaborate effectively, and use available tools and technology to deliver on their proposed plans. Moreover, on top of the core 4C skills mentioned previously, we have added two more Cs that we believe are vital for our students to have a broad understanding: 1) confidence and 2) community mindset. Confidence is something you develop through trying and failing, and we consider this a key belief to have for a resilient person. We encourage our students to fail fast and fail often during their project implementation experience. By community mind-set, we want our students to not only understand their individual roles and values in society but also realize what they can accomplish through the power of collective effort.
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So far, following the above approaches, we have two cohorts of creative problem solvers who have delivered two social innovation projects. One group published the “21st Century Toolkit'' in Mongolian and English. The entire project was an experiment and an opportunity for the fellows to hone their 6C skills while producing a toolkit on 6Cs. The English version of the toolkit travelled as far as Los Angeles, California, US, to be distributed to the partners of Nexon Foundation, in Africa, Asia, and the US. The second project is about composting household food waste and the fellows are proving during the challenging times of COVID-19 that it is feasible to produce impact even through remote work. We do not measure the success of projects. We evaluate the growth each student makes during the program and project. The “trick” is letting the students do what they want to and asking probing questions to make them dig deeper.
At the end of the program, we hope our students are able to understand the world around them and the talents within them to take on the next challenge. We hope that they become resourceful enough to not be discouraged by the barriers that are imposed by the system and are able to find creative ways to fulfill their learning desires beyond our workshops. Ultimately, we hope to contribute to preparing a new, engaged generation that appreciates their own heritage, respects the diversity of other cultures, and is enabled enough to become active and compassionate citizens. As we continue to develop and expand our education activities, we will continue to reflect on the needs and demands of our younger generation and will actively work to refresh our content and approach accordingly.