Need for a New Paradigm in Education

Dr. B. Çağla Garipağaoğlu

Chapter 1 The Legacies of the Past: Newtonian Paradigm in Education

Abstract:The world is now suffering from a deep educational crisis today. Our education system cannot keep up with our fast-paced world. We witness an increasing decline in confidence and public support for college education. Education and obtaining a college diploma, that once was considered as a taken-for-granted path to wealth and social advancement by most people, is now a source of countless debates. The Newtonian paradigm of schooling that worked so well for so many years is now not up for the job it was once set for. Products of our educational system (i.e. our graduates) no longer fit the needs and demands of the today’s labor market. Employers are complaining about the incompatibility between job requirements and employee/graduate qualifications; graduates are complaining about not being able to find a job because the employers either reject their job applications claiming that they are either under-educated or over-educated for the type of employment they have applied for; parents are complaining that “the kind of academic education” that opened so many doors for them no longer works for their children; and some politicians even blame the over-education of young learners as the reason for under-employment among the highly educated young people. Despite the numerous efforts to transform our Newtonian education to cure the very problems it has created, the basic notion of Newtonian schooling remained strictly unchanged over the last century. There are multiple reasons why we cannot transform our Newtonian educational system and shift to the Quantum paradigm. In this chapter, we will pinpoint those reasons and a few major misconceptions why the models of quantum paradigm often struggle to take root in education.

For more than 100 years, the Newtonian-inspired way of reductionist understanding dominated the world’s main approach to schooling. The strength of the Newtonian paradigm was that through its method of reductionism it had shown the world that there was only one unique, universal truth that can be revealed by scientific methods – which we now know is not true (Louth, 2011). According to this decades-long entrenched Newtonian rule, our schools have been constructed around an individual teacher leading a group of same-aged pupils through a uniform curriculum (Rose et al., 2022). The authors of “Out of the Box” report called this approach to schooling the “industrial paradigm” as it was mirroring the standardized ways in which factories operated during the industrial era (Rose et al., 2022). Just because our schools were built in a way to reflect the so-called strength of the Newtonian-reductionist way of understanding the world, this approach – in this chapter – will be called the “Newtonian paradigm”. However, despite the so-called strength of the Newtonian way of schooling, today, as learners make their way through this paradigm, approximately 66 % end up “disengaged” (Arnett, 2022a) proving that this paradigm no longer benefits the world. While this paradigm significantly increased the world’s access to education, it did not necessarily ensure learning. While the parents, educators and politicians keep on uttering their continued testimonies about the value of education to the young generations, worldwide millions of children graduate from the education system without even the most basic skills (World Bank, 2019). Most of them, for example, are simply still struggling to calculate the correct amount of change to return when performing a cash transaction, having a hard time in understanding Ikea’s assembly instructions, or reading a transit schedule. Research shows that even those who successfully navigate the system gain only a limited set of academic skills that may or may not align with their individual needs, interests, and strengths (Arnett, 2022a). Plus, as a side effect, learners often develop fixed and narrow mindsets about their potentials and evaluate their value and identity through the narrow framing of academic ranking and sorting systems (Arnett, 2022a). Therefore, almost all parents are in search of a “better” education and “better” schools for their children, while most employers are frantically complaining about the “skill gap” between universities and the business world (Prensky, 2018). Countries and politicians try to make systemwide reforms in education enthusiastically – often in vain – in order to align skills acquired in schools to those of skills needed in the marketplace.

For most of the world, the “American Dream” and what it represents is so much more elusive today (Agarwal, 2017). To begin with, now a university degree costs a lot higher than it cost compared with a mere decade ago, making the first step of the American dream out of many of our youth’s reach. Many college-age students are struggling with student loans and more than half of them say that their loans weren’t worth it (Hess, 2021). At the same time, more and more employers are complaining that they can’t find qualified candidates to fill the job openings. According to Turczynski (2023), about 50 % of employers reportedly say that they have job openings, but they can’t find qualified candidates to fill them. This demand for qualified people will keep increasing as economies and jobs get more sophisticated over time. However, our youth are just ill-equipped to launch a fulfilling career because they are lacking the necessary skills and professional knowledge. What’s more, there are new jobs emerging that didn’t even exist a decade ago. However, our education system cannot keep up with our fast-paced world. We are not even close to meeting the critical demands of today’s learners, employees, and employers. Employers are looking for people “who can get things done”. Yet, the type of schooling – almost all the world’s people go through between the ages of roughly 5 and 21 – offers almost no preparation at all to thrive in the real world. Our education system cannot keep up with our ever-changing, digitally driven workplace. We are not even close to meeting the critical demands of today’s learners, employees, and employers.

Although it is at odds with the realities of the world we live in today, we must admit that our schools are doing exactly what they are built to do. The reason that our education system suffers from a deep learning crisis today is that it was built for a different age – when the Newtonian paradigm approach to schooling was considered the most efficient way of education. Yet, with globalization, digital transformations, pandemic, and natural disasters transforming the world, our schools patterned after the factory-model of the industrial age are no longer up for the needs of our current realms. We no longer need factory workers who are merely able to execute repetitive tasks, understand and follow directions and perform basic numeracy and literacy skills (Rose et al., 2022). What we really need are innovators, entrepreneurs and creative talents who can change the rules of the game (Garipağaoğlu, 2013). Our schools require a paradigm shift that put more emphasis on interdisciplinary mindset, critical thinking, problem- solving, and communication skills rather than rote memorization of a subject matter and the mastery of a limited set of academic knowledge (e.g. four operations) and test-taking skills (Zhao, 2012). We must eventually prepare our kids for the future by integrating real-world problems into our education system.

While creating great challenges for learners, worldwide technological transformations and natural disasters are also creating new possibilities both for learners and teachers by changing the way we learn and teach (Anderson et al., 2017). The pandemic has shown the world that we are all interconnected and highly vulnerable in the face of the unpredictable nature of the future. We must understand that our current education model was indeed designed for the First Industrial Revolution. Yet, we no longer live in the First Industrial Revolution. Fueled with globalization and technology, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has already arrived, and the Fifth one is at the door. Apparently, our strongest competitive advantage that will single out our nation and people in the Fourth & Fifth Industrial Revolution will be our ingenuity and entrepreneurship of our next-gen. Therefore, it is in our best interest to re-design our education system to meet the dynamic needs of the fourth industrial revolution and get prepared for the fifth Industrial Revolution by equipping our kids with the skills required for the 21^st century workforce. Indeed, every part of K-12 and higher education needs to redesign its approach and outcomes to increase voice and choice of students and foster entrepreneurial mindsets in our young people (Prensky, 2014).