Throughout history, education has borne the responsibility of leading change, including social, cultural, scientific, political changes, and more, while it has maintained its responsibilities in preserving and stabilizing the past so as not to change. However, these days it seems unable to keep up with changes, nor to hinder them! Educators around the world are conservative, but they are even more so here! This is what became apparent to me through the journey of Jordanian education, confirmed during two new variables: the first; the new education law that repealed 90% of the law from 1964, when the world was stable, and each country was isolated,
and no one knew what was happening outside his country! Today, with the world having become very small, what's required is to read this world and its variables. The other variable is the exemption of schools from studying a four-day work week!
They are still thinking in the jungles of the past!!
(1)
The four-day work week!
There are studies around the world that show the positivity of the four-wheel drive work week and the three-day weekend, and many have moved towards implementing this model especially in companies that care about time! As they say: a vacation is a revitalization for the work schedule! A rested worker is more productive than a tired one! Nevertheless, a local study is necessary to confirm this positivity! Jordanians trust only in what they make themselves, instead of foreign research!!
What matters to us here is the beginning of the poem, where schools were exempted from even thinking about the four-wheel drive work week!
It means our thinking in schools is still: schedules, control, and exhaustion… etc.
And here lies the problem!!
(2)
Students are the hardest workers!!
A student sleeps early, in order to be able to wake up at five in the morning; to gather himself, his books, his needs, and perhaps leave before six for the bus that "honks" for him outside. The students return in cities, and each of our villages has become a city, at five in the evening, laden with homework that totals no less than three hours daily across seven days.
And this means that a student spends in educational and school affairs:
50 school hours +21 study hours =71 hours!!!
What human, from miners, to the unemployed, to office managers, works this massive number of hours?!!!
And when does a student feel his humanity if the school is draining him of these hours, amid boredom, exhaustion, and obligatory attendance, and attempts at escaping and private tutoring??
Students need a four-wheel drive work week the most! What about the teachers?!
(3)
And the teachers are exhausted!!
A teacher works what is equivalent to twenty-four hours a week! And it is said: every hour requires another hour of prior preparation! As well as another hour afterwards: analyzing, correcting homework, examination papers, and other matters.
Thus a teacher works:
25 classroom hours +25 hours of prior preparation +25 hours of gathering afterwards=75 hours!
And this means in practice that teachers work more than forced laborers, housemaids, and ministers!!
They need the four-wheel drive work week the most!
(4)
Education has changed!!!
Education and instruction are no longer information transmitted through teachers!
And instruction is no longer mandatory!
And it's no longer a book with a thick cover!
The Ministry of Education knows this! And the citizen knows it!!
But they operate as if the past will live forever, and as if the future will never come!!
The future of education is now known: self-directed learning, away from set curricula!
Learn "online" from homes and educational cafes, through platforms of intelligent teachers whom the official work environment did not allow to show any degree of their intelligence.
The new education law has another story in an upcoming article!!
The result: We are still far from thinking about the future; because education needs future visions that are not present!
Got it?!!
