Response - Kian on Tertiary Education

Transcription

Yo, my name is Kian and I'm from Labrador Grove in West London, so the question I'm going to be tackling today is how would you change tertiary education and I think a good starting point is being able to define the purpose of education.

So in the simplest way possible, the purpose of education is to acquire new knowledge, skills, and experience and I think what's interesting is that's changed a lot in the last hundred or two hundred years whereas the way education has been distributed and shared and promoted hasn't.

So to give you an example, back in the day education and knowledge was very scarce and finite, so unless you had access to books or a library, which was often in these kind of elite hubs like the University of Oxford or other academic centers, there wasn't really a way for you to acquire knowledge or to become educated.

Whereas I think if you look at it now, every person, every young person today has all of the world's knowledge on their mobile phones and education now is 100% accessible if you've got a mobile phone and if you've got access to Wi-Fi. Everyone has the same access to knowledge, which wasn't the case back in the day, even like 50 years ago, and I think education needs to adapt accordingly.

So if now everyone has access to knowledge, I think the role of tertiary education is to help students and to help people ask the right questions and learn how to learn rather than learn a subject in itself.

And the way I would recommend doing that is three key areas. So the first one is being in the real world. So why not give every student, rather than them studying in a classroom for a year, two years, three years, give them all five thousand pounds and let them come up with a business and do everything themselves and learn in the real world.

My second idea is why not give them a grant to travel to the developing world and to see how life is for the majority of the people living on this earth, and that would give them empathy but also increase their understanding of the rest of the world.

And lastly, I would say changing the criteria to include creativity, imagination, and some of the softer skills.