School education should provide children with necessary knowledge, skills and development of willingness to take part in the society as responsible citizens. After studying for 12 or 13 years, students leave their schools as holders of either vocational job training certificates or highschool diplomas. Then, they will choose to enter one of the followings:
universities, colleges and institutes for further education
work where they may or may not be provided with supervised training
family work.
No matter where school graduates choose to go, they will contribute in running the communities where they live. They will also continue to learn while working under supervision or by themselves. General situations of a place (village, town or city) can tell the state of the education in the community. A city with overflowing waste, chocked drainage or non-existence of drainage, dirty public restrooms, noisy dirty and dangerous construction sites mean things are out of management. More could be learned from peoples of the community. School graduates might say they forget most of the math and physics they have been taught at schools. They memorized the formulas only to pass exams, and it is okay to forget them after.
What should a society looks like where peoples want to live, work, contribute and build healthy families? As human beings we would talk mostly about need and desire of peoples. The nature does not actually belong to just human beings. There are countless number of other life forms (including plants) in nature interacting each other in a complex way we would never understand fully. Nevertheless, we will pay more attention to ourselves (humans first attitude) but we should also pay attention to the environment, plants and animals as much as we could. Because if we focus too much for our benefits (most of them may be emotional and for those who can afford rather than the needs for all of us), we will face with significant troubles in the long run.
Some of the goals of public school education in developing regions:
Clean place for healthy life: Much cleaner and greener environment and healthy villages, towns and cities (public hygiene). Clean, safe and healthy foods and food management.
Safe place: All man-made structures (both temporary and permanent built environment) to be built safe and functional. Capacity and skills for disaster management, search and rescue, and reconstruction are being improved. Ability to decide what is necessary, design, build and clean up with minimum damage to environment and society. Needs for healthy community, peaceful and fair society should be given priority.
Necessary knowledge and skills: Ownership and management of full cycle production, use, recycling or disposal of all basic important and necessary products and services including clean food and water. Tool making and willingness to build with own hands out of available resources as much as possible are things children can learn at school.
Rules: Work discipline, rules for safety, functionality, and quality work-done with minimum disturbance to environment.
Physical and mental: Reasonably healthy peoples with higher survival strength against possible disasters/hardships. Peoples treating peoples with great consideration and helping minds. Peoples use reasonable level of logic (consistency, minimum bias, maximum honesty, desire to know the truth and not to conclude from incomplete information) in communication and decision making.
How do we build such a public education? This requires a lot of willingness and collaboration, hard works, problem solvings and resources including time. The followings are some opinion pieces:
Comprehensive health education from primary to grade 12. In each grade, students can be taught and given chance to practice. By spreading over many years, students will not be overloaded. Things to include:
Personal and public hygiene including clean and healthy toilet, bathroom, kitchen.
Food safe and nutrition
Human anatomy and how each component work, and healthy natural ways of living
Understanding of peoples with health issues and elderly persons
Urban and rural waste system (spread over many years to reduce study load on students):
What is waste with the background of history of life forms
About the need to buy only the necessary things and services to reduce the use and waste, and reuse
At home, in the street and in the town waste management and how peoples can take part to make the community livable.
About the tools, materials and management needed to build a proper waste system. What part you can contribute when you grow up?
Basic Logic (middle school and high school):
Propositional logic and basic set theory included in math study
Mathematical and physical reasoning without numbers and with numbers
Symbolic math (use symbols to describe a situation, etc.).
About building of elements of math and science with reasoning.
Tool making and simple machines (this may be included in history and then physics study):
History of tools making
Use of our body components as tools.
Primitive tools
Development of tools
Simple machines, and machines that are combinations of more than one simple machines.
Work safe study (middle school and high school):
Introduction to accidents and disasters
Interactions between objects (force, energy, materials), and motion
Safe handling of objects to avoid accidents and damage
Need of rules and disciplines in works
Improvement in math and science education:
Pay more attention on building of knowledge and logical reasoning. Reduce repeated activity of "plug the numbers into formula and use calculator" and "remembering the formula or procedure for each type of question".
Link math and science to other parts of education such as tool making, work safe and waste reduction
Possible change in exam design to accommodate these changes.
Reduce over-dependence on ready-made tools and softwares in solving problems.
Build awareness of danger of technology.
Environmental education
History of universe and evolution of life form, and history of waste
Dynamic of environment and effects of technology and human life style
Nature conservation works starting at homes, schools and neighbourhood
Improvement in vocational education:
Quality of vocational schools be improved continuously.
Teachers' training and within school production of tools
Improvement in safety and health, facilities assisted by private & public sectors.
Increase the number of vocational schools so that every town or city has one.
Include the study of agriculture and food production in at least one vocational school in each town or city for self sufficiency.
Participation of citizens, businesses and organizations in improvement of their community schools:
Financial assistance, places, tools and expertises for teachers' training
Citizens with higher level of skills and knowledge take part as (volunteer) teachers
Improvement of school campus and school facilities
Collaboration between ministries and private organization:
Professionals take part in related education. For example, health professionals provide health education. Department of disaster and emergency management gives regular education at schools.
Government and private sectors work together to build local full cycle productions of products to support healthy life (for example, local production of materials for healthy toilet and bathroom, water and waste system), and educational tools. Definitions and realization of measuring units and measuring tools should be available locally.
Identification of and building required facilities and professionals needed for sports and fitness education that can greatly improve health, and survival ability of citizens in case of accidents, disasters (natural or man-made), other hardships and unforeseen circumstances.