Out of Date

There have been recent concerns that the education system is not up to international standard, and has recently found itself in the Fiji Times:

"The question that I want to pose to you is whether our curriculum has kept pace with the international trends and more so the last revolution which took place internationally, that is, the ICT revolution.

"It is my assessment on the basis of materials that I have seen both in primary and secondary curriculum, that our curriculum has not kept pace.

"Unless the curriculum in the education system keeps pace with changes both internationally and domestically, I don't think we will be able to produce students and teachers who will be able to fit into society to higher stages of development."

In response, Minister for Education Filipe Bole yesterday said it was difficult at this point in time to say whether Fiji's school curriculum were modern or not.

 In all honesty, has the Fiji curriculum been lagging behind for a little more than these past few years?

As someone who went from what I termed "normal high school" to the International School in Suva, I was shocked at the level of analysis I had to develop in a matter of weeks.

In a typical school, you're meant to regurgitate all the notes that you get in class. It's about cramming, not understanding.

In the IB, doing science meant that you had to memorise formulas and when I went to do Physics at ISS, you had to understand why things happened. There were actual questions, not just use the formulas you crammed.

I went to ISS to do this programme. It has it's own logo.

Learning to analyse and see what's credible and even the Fiji times is using Wikipedia, which is highly worrying.

In this Digital Age, while we have courses like UU100 to force people to learn whats  credible on the internet, that should find its way down to primary school. It's a time for the molding of minds and no internet cafe proprietor is going to turn any source of money away.

that is to say that children are going to get online and they need to know what to believe and what not to. That goes for the radio and tv, not to mention newspaper; we believe what's there because it has to be credible, right? It's on the airwaves, on our screens or published in print.

No one is going to learn until they question what they're given and understand what they should know.