Recently, I saw my parents chuckling over a meme they received from one of their friends. It said, “I’m so glad I learned about parallelograms instead of taxes in school. It’s really come in handy this parallelogram season.”
While I know it’s a joke and that there is a reason we learn geometry, when I asked my mother why we study it, she explained that it is an important subject for the development of spatial reasoning, which is a skill I would need in case I decide to pursue architecture, design, or cartography. As someone who loves history, I find architecture, design, and maps endlessly fascinating. Now I wish I’d connected geometry to history before.
Which brings me to a two-part point: kids like me don’t just need practical subjects, we also need to be taught traditional subjects in a whole new way.
My parents, like most parents, often tend to get nostalgic. I am amazed by some of their stories and how so much of what they learned depended on their ability to memorise things – even when it came to subjects like Math.
My world and life, as a digital native, is nothing like theirs. And I already know that ten years from now, when I am ready to join the world of entrepreneurship or employment, the ‘systems’ and knowledge of my childhood will already be outdated. I also have endless information at the tip of my fingers twenty-four seven. I don’t need to memorise anything for the sake of simply memorising it anymore.
What I do need is the ability to understand and process the information that is coming at me all the time, in unique ways that can be used to solve the problems the world faces.
And for that, it is very clear to me that we need new-age learning that helps us think beyond the confines of textbooks.
I have a friend in my BrightCHAMPS group who used to hate Math until she started learning it in the context of taxes, investments, and valuations. Her dream is to run a fashion and beauty e-commerce company when she grows up. She’s only a little older than me, but she’s studying entrepreneurship, coding, and financial literacy as early preparation for her future life.
Another friend who studies robotics can never stop talking about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) usage. He plans to study bias, discrimination, and the human economic impact as it relates to the use of AI in the future. He is obsessed with the question of at what point AI will become so sophisticated that we will have to consider the consciousness and rights of the ‘Artificial Superintelligences’ around us. He wants to run an Ethics in AI think-tank.
Learning new subjects in a new way is not just about preparing for the future when you know with absolute certainty what you want to do as an adult. I love to travel and I love history but learning coding is what has helped me appreciate all the language, navigation, and crowd-sourcing recommendation apps we use when we travel. Because I don’t just passively use them; I have already studied what goes into the making of what I’m using so easily, and how difficult it is to make something that looks so simple and intuitive.
My world and my mind become richer each time I travel, and that would not have been possible if, say, I didn’t have language translation apps so that I don’t have to struggle to communicate.
The more I learn, the more I see the speed at which the world around me changing, I am increasingly convinced that those of us who wait until we are adults to be exposed to new-age skills, subjects, and ways of learning will be at a significant disadvantage compared to those whose minds were trained to look beyond the textbook and form connections between seemingly unconnected subjects and pieces of information.
I am convinced that the future belongs to those who see Doric columns in the study of cylinders and rebates and deductions in subtraction!
(Vivaan Bhushan is an 11-year-old student of BrightCHAMPS, an EdTech platform. Views expressed are his own.)
