[CommonWealth Education] Rejecting One-Way Learning! KUMON Hands Over the Control of Learning to Children
Youtubers, game data planners, digital forensics analysts, tech farmers... As technology drastically changes the world we live in, it also brings unexpected new job opportunities. Faced with the unknown, what kind of talents does the future world require? What abilities must children today develop to handle the challenges of the future?
With increasingly intense environmental changes and more unknown fields, how should children learn to love learning and not fear being replaced by AI?
In response, Shih Yu-ting, a teacher at the KUMON Sanmin Chengping Center, first raised this question:
Parents often have this experience in the process of raising children: When a child excitedly shares their creation or drawing, parents, upon realizing what the child has drawn or made, are quick to "direct" the child, eager to point out what is wrong or doesn't look like what it's supposed to, in order to correct it as quickly as possible. Or, when taking a child to a big mall, if a child becomes captivated by a sales representative using a loudspeaker and refuses to leave, parents rush to pull them away.
"Parents shouldn't rush to provide answers or make decisions. Instead, they should listen to the child's observations and understand why they are doing what they're doing," she shares warmly. She recalls one time when her son, a kindergartner, came home excitedly after class, holding up a drawing he had made. The drawing was of a black, muddy round shape that, at first glance, looked like random scribbles resembling feces. Shih Yu-ting didn't rush to respond but instead let her son share his creation and observations. Only then did she learn that the drawing was actually of a large mound of dirt formed by ants building a nest.
Even when her son was fascinated by a mop demonstration in a department store, she didn't rush him to leave. Instead, she let him finish listening and encouraged him to share what he had discovered. "Surprisingly, later he developed an interest in cleaning and, once he got hold of the mop, he was able to apply the techniques the sales representative had demonstrated."