Is Education In 2020 Fit For Purpose? – By John Hart, Principal Of The International School Of Budapest
- 15 Oct 2020 3:13 PM
‘Schools and universities in the developing world are doing a good job overall at preparing students – for the twentieth century. Unfortunately, we are now well into the twenty-first century’. So wrote Anthony Sheldon, Vice Chancellor of Buckingham University, UK.
Here, at ISB, we take our responsibility for preparing our pupils for life in the 21st. Century very seriously. Assuming that after leaving our school and going onto university, many of our younger pupils will not start work until around 2035 and possibly not retire until well into the next century. That is the future for which we are preparing them. Who knows what skills and knowledge will be needed then?
So how are we approaching this challenge? We do it thus. In addition to teaching either the British or Hungarian curriculum we place great emphasis on our Values and Competences programme which we teach to ALL pupils from pre-prep to Grade 12.
Values will define a child’s character and competences are a unique combination of skills, attributes and dispositions which will enable children to engage successfully with the world around them. Furthermore, in a rapidly changing world, the competences will provide our pupils with skills which focus on flexibility, creativity and being life-long learners.
We are living in a world of rapid technological growth and change which potentially renders the acquisition of current technical and subject-based knowledge quickly redundant.
The core values which we will encourage and develop with our pupils include the following – resilience, respect, empathy, integrity, honesty, care and increasingly important in our multi-cultural society, tolerance.
Acquiring knowledge and learning facts are important and, alongside teaching them and preparing our pupils for crucial external examinations such as the IGCSE and the IB Diploma, it is the competences and values which we place at the very centre of our teaching and the heart of ISB.
Thus, preparing our pupils to successfully and confidently meet the challenges of the unknown world which lies ahead of them.
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