By Sajid Khan/New York
The next World Innovation Summit for Education (Wise), initiated by Qatar, has a real opportunity to become a wake-up call for a ground-breaking reform. It can highlight factors that have produced the same different classes of society again and again for thousands of years.
Twenty per cent of our students enter the classroom emotionally “super healthy”. They graduate “highly prepared” to make a living. Thirty per cent enter the classroom “mostly emotionally healthy”. They are “adequately prepared” to make a living. Thirty per cent more come “emotionally partly unhealthy”. These struggle to pay their bills. Twenty per cent enter the classroom “emotionally sick”. They can’t make a living, remaining a big drain on society as they commit crimes to illegally take what they cannot get legally.
We brand students who are predisposed to failure because of their emotional intelligence handicaps as failures, reinforcing their emotionally challenged brains. Schools perpetuate emotionally-challenged education that results in 80% of society having some form of emotional sickness that not only affects their earning capacity but also determines the very nature of our society.
Emotional intelligence education must start from birth onwards and should be well set by the age of five. It is parenting that determines the quality of school education. So to improve school education we have to make sure that all parents are qualified to provide healthy emotional intelligence education.
The success of regular education is dependent on the emotional intelligence level of the student. This emotional intelligence level is well set by the time a student is ready to go to school starting at pre-K. When students start school, their education success and failure is already well set for the rest of their academic life.
Making sure that every parent provides the emotional intelligence education required to make their children emotionally healthy is the only solution to the current mess in education and in society at large.
Education is exactly like a building where the foundation is built by parents. Parents who provide an emotionally healthy upbringing ensure a better chance of success in education as well as in life than any other factor.
Education and society are a mess now because 80% of students start school with a shaky emotional intelligence foundation. The Wise Summit can initiate real education reform and help create cutting-edge education by highlighting parenting as the most essential part of education.
We need to hold regular courses and seminars for parents and teachers on emotional intelligence .
We must ensure emotionally healthy education from birth onwards, much before pre-K. Not only must the Wise summit propose this new parenting subject it must also provide the curriculum for it.
- Sajid Khan may be contacted on [email protected]
