Is the school fuelling your child’s dreams?

It is important for parents and educators to find the essence of their children and to allow them to develop in their own way, at their own speed and in their own time. And parents, when you ask advice from professionals, take the instruction, and try the systems suggested.

Building a person’s characters is as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. The reason so many people are geared towards looking for a job is because, in the past, workers were required. Today we need entrepreneurs, not workers, yet schools remain focused on yesterday’s needs.

Is the school fuelling your child’s dreams, is the question every parent should ask themselves. Education comes at a cost. We can’t make it cheaper, but we can make it better. We need neither submission nor memorisation. We need dreams – and the ability and the will to make them come true. Dreams flicker long before they shine brightly. They are difficult to build and easy to destroy. Instead of destroying dreams we should be developing them. Parents and their children are the people who can make schools different – the world has changed and it’s time for schools to follow. Group projects should be the norm in schools yet most academic activity is done alone – homework, examinations, writing. You won’t find a competent businessperson saying, “I don’t know what to do, I’ll figure it out myself” – think tanks and group discussions help solve problems.

We demand that our children have a trade or profession to ‘fall back on’, and then we tell them to focus on the job because ‘there’s time to dream later’. With this attitude we continue delivering the safe, but ill-fated strategy of churning out predictable, testable, mediocre workers. We should be creating young people who engage and grow, yet most schools push for sameness, dumbing down the individual while attempting to raise the average. Risk-taking should be encouraged. It can, and should, be taught in schools.

 Now is the time to dream. We are looking for dreamers, not drop-outs and because of the education system lacking to find the essence of the following entrepreneurs, they dropped out and made names – and money – for themselves. At the age of 24, Elon Musk started a doctoral programme in physics and dropped out after two days. Today he is worth 182,6 billion USD. Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Dell’s Michael Dell, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and Apple’s Steve Jobs are all college dropouts who have become the multi-millionaires and billionaires of Silicon Valley.

Is the curriculum your child is being taught developing a stronger society? Would you like your child to be in charge or to be the assistant to the person in charge where he/she can help that person realise their dreams and live their fairytale lifestyle?