Rebooting Pedagogy and Education Systems for the Twenty-First Century: Why We Need Course-Corrections Immediately

Education is the fundamental pillar upon which any human civilization rests. As a matter of fact, no civilization in any meaningful form or degree has been possible in human history that has not been built on the bulwark and edifice of education. While literacy may have been limited to the privileged few in early ancient civilizations, it was these privileged few who controlled the masses and set the tempo for meaningful progress in such civilizations; educational systems have proven to be the bedrock and foundational pillar upon which much of human accomplishment and achievement have rested, too. In spite of the naysayers, the cynics and the pessimists, education has expanded greatly in the twentieth century; while the worlds' earliest civilizations were not western in the canonical sense of the term, there is no denying that western civilizations have pulled away strongly since then. Riding on the shoulders on ancient Greece, western intellectualism has been the bulwark upon which the superstructure of modern civilization has been built. Even as recently as the middle of the twentieth century, the rest of the world (as opposed to the west) had a lot of catching up to do.