Ms. Shamaila Saleem
Valued educators and parents,
Success looks different now than it did in the past. High-achieving institutions, around the globe, increasingly expect to educate their students to live and work anywhere in the world, travel as often as they like, think and analyse their surroundings in a critical way, create an environment to keep up with their interests and abilities, collaborate distinctive ideas to earn a career that is not capped by a salary figure and communicate in the best way to avail opportunities in the international arena .For people who don’t live like this it can sound far-fetched, but I am certain that this kind of lifestyle is growing rapidly.
As far as I see, National standards and national curriculum, enforced by high-stakes testing, can at best teach students what is prescribed… As a result, students talented in other areas never have the opportunity to discover those talents. Students with broader interests are discouraged, not rewarded. The system results in a population with similar skills in a narrow spectrum of talents. Past methods make little sense to today’s students who learn and think differently, and they make little sense in relation to the changing workplace, where making use of digital information is now far more valuable than simply knowing things. Schools are failing to teach students to respond to rapid change and how to handle new information because they are clinging to obsolete methods, whereas, in today’s society, innovation and creativity are needed in many areas, some as yet undiscovered.
‘The more complex the world becomes the more creative we need to be to meet its challenges’, and to instill such skills in our students is becoming increasingly clear in education and the workplace. People now need to be creative and digitally literate to be successful. We must implement a 21st century education system that emphasize on critical and analytical thinking along with creativity, skills that are necessary to do well in a personal or professional environment ensuring a secure future for our upcoming generations.
Ms. Shamaila Saleem
Headmistress Beaconhouse School System Lahore (BMTL)