Are we delivering Education as a "fast food" concept?

The question that I want to analyse in this post is: "Are we delivering Education as a "fast food" concept, rather than as a personalized experience for the individuals who, we are indeed, responsible for?".

When cooking “fast food” meals, there are general recipes which one need to follow in order to cook that particular meal. In my opinion, we are following this type of rhythm. As in “fast food” one has to follow recipes, teachers are also given these “recipe” which in this case it is the syllabus. Teachers are sort of ‘forced’ by stakeholders to follow it in order to prepare students at the end of the scholastic year to the exams and at the end of the secondary school to the Matsec exams.

From this point of view, we are delivering Education as a “fast food”. One has to question, what happen when you teach students who are in Form 4 Mathematics and they do not know basic functions and principles of mathematics. How can we teach them advance level when they do not have the basic level?

Today, we are moving away from steaming to mixed ability classes. Are teachers catering for all students or because of restricted time we are not? I think teachers are facing a lot of dilemmas. I believe that the first think that we need to accept is that although we are teachers we do not know everything and I think that training is required in order to help us to adapt and believe in the new educational tools.

Here I recall what an LSA told me during my teaching practice. She told me that her student followed easier in my lesson because during explanation I used presentation. Even his mother explained to her that if teachers used visual graphics in order to explain things it would be easier to her son to improve learning. But the LSA commented that not all teachers were willing to spend more time to do presentations. Thus although there are new tools which could help this student and other like him, still teachers because of some reasons are not willing to use these new tools.

I think that we all agree that teachers are responsible for students’ learning and we should help students to engage in learning and to encourage them to learn. But I think that there are a lot of issues to solve in order to move away from the “fast food” concept not only from the teachers’ end but also from the students’ end and from the education division end.