Question from the internet:
What should change in the elementary education system to prepare kids for a better future?
Today, students begin their elementary formal education as early as three years old. In a society in which both parents have to work due to various personal and social demands, children are put in schools at a very early age. Is the elementary school system ready to help those children form into an interconnected healthy society that cares for each other, that believes that everybody is equal, and that should be treated as such?
The elementary school system that exists today was designed with the goal to develop competitive students that are always looking for ways of being the best at everything at the expense of its fellow citizens. The basic goal in elementary education should be to teach the children to learn to be human beings that know how to bestow to the people around them. In the elementary classroom students can play games that promote goodness and interconnectedness. They can learn how the world is a big village in which everybody is the same and their differences in culture, race, and language can become a learning experience by itself. Classes should include lessons on bestowal, in which students learn how to share, care, and support their fellow classmates. Teachers should teach our children to become better human beings, united by their desire to give, they should not develop in the students a desire to only compete and search for power. By following these egoistic values, this kind of society is doomed to collapse due to the greed and selfishness of its inhabitants.
Elementary education is considered the most important phase in child’s development. The child is separated from their parents in which their relationship is one of dependency, to be part of an environment in which they need to learn how to interact and build connections between other children from different backgrounds. Interrelationship could become the basic steppingstone of these young students, building a new society whose values are based in interconnection.
The elementary education curriculum writers should take into consideration the importance of creating an integral program that will help develop the young students into the desire society of the future: kind, compassionate, respectful, and understanding of differences and the need of equality. These values do not hinder the goals of having the students learn well the different contents, and being successful in their chosen careers, on the contrary, it makes them better people because they become a complete human being that not only cares for themselves, but also for their fellow citizens. Without the values of bestowal and love, we will not have a healthy, strong society. It will continue being violent, self-serving, and divided.
Let the educators, experts in curriculum, in children psychology, in children development, and so forth, build a program that includes the human values intertwined with the content and, by doing that, create a better future, a better society, a better world.