Classrooms, blackboards, tests, and traditional education methodologies are a thing of the past. Juli Garbulsky, a mathematics student known for his TED talk ‘Zombies in School’, outlined some educational approaches to encourage student engagement in schools and make the educational experience more enjoyable and rewarding, both at school and in real life.
“Every day at school was the same: copying from the blackboard and repeating it on tests. Every day it was: blackboard, folder, test. I felt like a prisoner. I liked airplanes, but at school there was no place for that. My life was divided between school and the real world. The same thing happened to my friends. School stole our time to learn,” said Garbulsky.
Among the points that the Argentinean presented are: Student participation in academic decision-making, exploration of more personalized methodologies and the inclusion of areas of the creative sector such as music, art, graphic sciences or even aviation.
At the XI Leaders for Education Summit in 2011, Garbulsky participated in the conference ‘Connecting school with real life’, a space whose main purpose was to analyze and propose new learning methods for students in secondary and higher education, so that children and young people develop skills that are effective and applicable to their needs in the real world.
In November 2015, Garbulsky presented his TED talk ‘Zombies in School’ in Rio de la Plata (Argentina) and it was a huge success. To date, it has accumulated more than two million views on YouTube. Its main purpose was to question the learning methodologies of traditional education. According to Garbulsky, the education of the future must be thought of differently: more creative and grounded in the reality of students.
According to Garbulsky, it is necessary to give importance to the knowledge that real life requires, focusing on the needs and tastes of students. For example, project-based education, which can offer students knowledge that lasts over time, in addition to being fun and liberating spaces.
“One of those spaces was the math olympiads. Here you didn’t have to ‘find X’. The instructions didn’t ask you to do something mechanically, you had to think. Riddles. To solve them, you had to try different paths, fail, trial and error, use creativity, share ideas with others. Just like in real life: we learned math, but without reciting it by heart, but by learning to think,” the student recalled.
Activities like these, Garbulsky added, had an impact on optimizing tasks, formulating everyday questions and strengthening critical thinking. He also recounted the experience of a rocket project that allowed him to learn about load distribution, aerodynamic processes, and, finally, to recognize the importance of trial and error.
“What these activities have in common is that they combine leaving the classroom with the possibility of choice. In this way, each person can create their own real world,” he added.
For Garbulsky, attending school should be a fun experience for students, as it is the best place to learn about real-world challenges. Behind academic activities, both academic knowledge and skills for the future must be included: teamwork, work optimization.
“We can look for opportunities like these, to make school not just about copying and repeating. It should not be about passing. Instead of blackboards, it should be about choosing, exploring and learning. And so, instead of turning us into zombies, school would wake us up. It would make us want to learn, compose music or find out why airplanes fly,” the speaker concluded.
At the end of the conference, Garbulsky presented a puzzle for summit attendees to explore his methodology. The biggest invitation to the audience: keep asking questions.
