Transcription
Translator: Keira White
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
I would like to start with a general thought, which is that we spend a large part of our lives educating ourselves. Sometimes, when we think about education, we think directly about school. And that is logical because we spend a large part of our lives at school, from a very young age until we are adults. At school we learn many things. At school we learn concepts, we learn about issues from different disciplines, that are very useful. At school, sometimes we find our vocation. But school is not the only place that we learn.
To quote Elizabeth Cabalé, she asks us to differentiate between education and schooling. School forms part of formal education, but there are also other places, outside of the classroom, where we learn all the time and that brings us to the concept of non-formal education. Non-formal education is the kind that we acquire through interactions with other people, through chats with our families, through our friendships, through the media, because we also learn and educate ourselves through the media. Or if we now think about the 21st century, social networks are a very powerful weapon when it comes to learning and education. So non-formal education has a very important weight to it and you have to make it visible.
For example, if we think about a thought or a view that we have about a topic, it is highly likely that we have endorsed it in conversations, in readings, in videos in this non-formal way, in chatting with people that we trust. And I think we can find something very valuable there and it’s the fact that there are great teachers, in the classroom, obviously, but also outside the classroom. So, I think that accepting that formal and non-formal education complement each other and they talk all the time, this also makes us realise that there is a very valuable freedom in the education process of each person. And that is fine. It’s fine that we are free to learn and to select the information that we are exposed to.
For the same reason, I think it’s very important that we develop two things. The first is critical thinking, because even more so, now that we have so much information, we have to know how to distinguish between what is real and what is not, or what is biased, in order to make good decisions. And the second thing that we have to develop is ethics from a universal perspective. Because when it comes to learning and passing on information, we always have to think about other people. We are not alone. So critical thinking and ethics are essential parts of the education process, that we have in school as well as out of it.
There is a Mexican author called Abel Pérez Rojas, who, along with other people, coined the term “permanent education”. And it means that we are always learning, because we are exposed to information and opinions, and because the world changes, and we have to adapt. And I think that the Academy also has to be renewed and refreshed, and be aware of this.
So, again I would like to tell you about a very interesting dichotomy that can help us to understand what skills we have to develop, both inside and outside of school. In school we almost always focus on hard skills. Hard skills are all the technical learning that we acquire, the useful learning. For example, how to drive or how to operate a machine, or operate on a person, or solve a maths problem or a social problem. All this is to do with methodical learning that we acquire in a formal way. But there are other types of skill that are just as relevant, which are soft skills. Soft skills are to do with emotional intelligence, with empathy, with adaptability and with many issues that on occasions are ignored from a formal perspective, but they are equally important.
A little while ago, LinkedIn published that the great companies of the world, really notice the people that, as well as work experience or technical learning, can develop these types of interpersonal skills. Because in the end, when developing in the world of work, we need to have that ability to negotiate, to understand other points of view, to organise ourselves with other people. In fact, it’s not just in the world of work that we need these skills, but also in our daily lives. If we think about any conflict, it might be a micro conflict that we have personally in our academic or work environment, or it might be a macro conflict, something that affects all of us. Normally, those conflicts just need to be resolved through the soft skills route. A conflict is rarely solved because we know how to solve it from a technical point of view. It is almost always because we get stuck in the dialogue processes or the adaptability processes, or when it comes to interacting and making decisions.
So, I would like to bring this round to the field of education again, because we see education as a process that has an end, and that end almost always seems to be economic, or at least aspirational. We study for a long time because we want to give ourselves hard skills in order to find employment and to improve ourselves. I would like us to shake off this idea, this paradigm. Because the truth is that education is a process, but education doesn’t have an end, because education is never finished, and also education doesn’t just have an economic goal. Education has many objectives that are being reconfigured all the time.
Going back to the point about soft skills in the resolution of conflicts, I think the good news is that almost any conflict can be resolved, but we have to come back to education because the formal and non-formal education processes are what can help us prevent those conflicts from even appearing. I think, to conclude, that if from inside and outside of the Academy we see education as something very comprehensive, a process where hard and soft issues, formal and non-formal education, are always discussed, and above all, a process which centres around the person, we can find certain clues about where education has to go in the 21st century. Probably, an education where a sense of ethics is favoured, where the foundations of critical thinking are also forged in a personal way. And an education that helps us to resolve conflicts thanks to other people. And that will help us a lot. Changing this perspective from a more comprehensive point of view can help us, I repeat, not just in formal processes, but also in our daily lives.