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Students must know the realities of world, says Dubai educator

Dubai - Dino Varkey, CEO of GEMS Education, said that many things taught to children today have become outdated.

Students need to be taught subjects that are more relevant to the realities of the world today, a leading education entrepreneur told Khaleej Times.
Dino Varkey, CEO of GEMS Education, said that many things taught to children today have become outdated and are not relevant in the rapidly changing contemporary world.
Varkey said the GEMS schools try to take a more proactive approach with students, where they focus on pupils' happiness and positivity.
"We're trying to take a much more proactive approach to see how we can teach our children about the world they are entering and make it much more relevant for our children in terms of their happiness and their positivity.
"At the end of the day, the most important barometer for whether a school is successful is 'are the children happy?'. So keep happiness at the centre of everything that a school tries to achieve - whether that's with its students, parents or its entire community," Varkey added.
"It is about students becoming the owners of their learning and learning about things that will fulfill their potential. I think, that is something education systems around the world need to be more focused on. We get so fixated on providing our children with a much ridged set of content, concepts or curriculum and the reality is the rate at which the world is changing and that's no longer relevant.
"If I take it broader than happiness and talk about global citizenship, the world is becoming more complicated and more complex and as a result it forces us to think about what are the things that will  truly remain relevant."
Varkey also touched on the scholarships and programmes the GEMS Education is providing to students. He revealed that their programme, 'Making Ghana Girls Great', has been noticed by other education charity organisations who are considering it as a wider solution for Syrian refugees.
"Today, we support about 6,700 students directly through the GEMS Education Network. I think the value of these scholarships is approximately $24 million a year.
"The aspirations to support children that are displaced by conflict are one of the things we are very excited about. We have a programme that our foundation runs called 'Making Ghana Girls Great. It's funded by the UN Development Agency and focuses on teaching.
"When it started, 3,500 girls across 72 rural communities were being taught by five teachers. That programme, over the last three years, has been successful enough that others are looking at it as a potential solution for others," he said.
sarwat@khaleejtimes.com