1 . Leisa Duckwall has worked for four years as a food nutrition service worker at the school, serving students breakfast and lunch. But not once had she ever seen a student say “hello”, or “good morning”, or even “thank you”, Duckwall is deaf. But now, the entire school is learning sign language, the students specifically to better communicate with Duckwall. No more point-ing, now, there are words, including “hello”, “good morning”, and “thank you”. When asked how it’s made her feel, Duckwall got straight to the point. “Happy,” she said.

Before spreading to the entire school, it started in Kari Maskelony’s fourth-grade classroom. Maskelony grew up with hard-of-hearing family members. She knows sign language, but throughout her life, she has witnessed her loved ones’ frustrations when people are unable to understand them. “I noticed that all the kids realized that Ms Duckwall couldn’t hear them,” Maskelony said. So she asked her students, “Do you guys want to learn how to sign to Ms Duckwall what you want for lunch instead of pointing?” They said yes. The class started with the basics of what they would need to know for interactions with Duckwall. They started with the main dishes, learning the sign language words for chicken, fish and other typical school cafeteria cuisines.

Next, the students learned to sign letters. It didn’t take long before principal Janet Wright Davis heard about what was going on. “Is it just Ms Maskelony’s class who are doing it? Let’s teach the whole school,” Janet said. “Let’s teach the whole school sign language.”

“Not only is it great for the kids because they can learn a new skill that they can carry with them and actually use with other people that they meet, but I think it is great because equal inclusivity (包容性) and equal access is so important,” Janet said. “It’s just something that we don’t often see.”

The teachers claim their students love sign language. The adults claim the kids think it’s “fun”, and they agree. Every single fourth-grader in Maskelony’s class gave sign language a positive review. And they all liked their collective hard work, if for nothing else, to make Duckwall feel included.

3 . The latest bad but unsurprising news on education is that reading and writing scores on the SAT have once again declined. The language competence of our high schoolers fell steeply in the 1970s and has never recovered. This is very worrisome, because the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal(语言的) score of 17-year-olds. This score correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and to secure a job. It also predicts future income.

The most credible analyses have shown that the chief causes are vast curricular changes, especially in the critical early grades. In the decades before the Great Verbal Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-centered approach. Cognitive psychologists agree that early childhood language learning (ages 2 to 10) is critical to later verbal competence, not just because of the remarkable linguistic plasticity of young minds, but also because of the so-called Matthew Effect.

The name comes from a passage in the Bible: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Those who are language-poor in early childhood get relatively poorer, and fall further behind, while the verbally rich get richer.

The origin of this cruel truth lies in the nature of word learning. The more words you already know, the faster you acquire new words. This sounds like an invitation to vocabulary study for babies, but that’s been tried and it’s not effective. Most of the word meanings we know are acquired indirectly, by intuitively(凭直觉的) guessing new meanings as we understand the main idea of what we are hearing or reading. The Matthew Effect in language can be restated this way: “To those who understand the main idea shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not there shall follow boredom and frustration.”

Clearly the key is to make sure that from kindergarten on, every student, from the start, understands the main idea of what is heard or read. If preschoolers and kindergartners are offered substantial and coherent lessons concerning the human and natural worlds, then the results show up five years or so later in significantly improved verbal scores. By staying on a subject long enough to make all young children familiar with it (say, two weeks or so), the main idea becomes understood by all and word learning speeds up. This is especially important for low-income children, who come to school with smaller vocabularies and rely on school to pass on the knowledge base children from rich families take for granted.

Current reform strategies focus on testing, improving teacher quality, and other changes. Attention to these structural issues has led to improvements in the best public schools. But it is not enough.

4 . For decades the message to students in the United Slates has been nearly the same: You need to go to college. Students have heard this message loud and clear, ever since their childhood. However, while encouraging students to further their education after high school is a noble and well-intentioned action, the current system in the United States has created some damaging side effects.

The largest and most well-known consequence is the student debt. Tuition and fees at our-year universities have risen by around 54% since 1999. Total student debt in the U.S. is estimated at around $1.6 trillion, so much that even the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos would have to increase his wealth by nearly nine times to pay off all of it.

Although the price of acquiring a bachelor’s degree has gone up, the relative value of having the actual degree has been watered down by the fact that holding a degree is now an expectation, not a bonus. The poor return on investment is also evidenced by the massive waves of students earning degrees in fields where there simply are not enough jobs for the number of graduates, leaving young adults in debt and out of work.

The push for students to go to college has also prevented them from considering careers in important fields that don’t necessarily require a four-year degree, such as construction and manufacturing. Despite the good pay and benefits in these industries, the lack of new blood has lded to growing shortages of both workers and skills，causing delays and higher costs in project like road repairs and infrastructure (基础设施) improvements.

Colleges and universities remain critical to our nation. But as a society, it would benefit us greatly to acknowledge that college isn’t the only form of higher education and career preparation. Students and young adults have more options than they think and informing them of those opportunities can go a long way toward making higher education as a whole more effective, efficient and affordable.

5 . I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn’t pass a course, they got the grade “Not Yet”. I thought that was fantastic.     1     But if they got the grade “Not Yet”, they understood that they were on a learning curve.

“Not Yet” also gave me more insight. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way.     2     They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment and they failed.

I’ll tell you what they do next. In one study, they told us they would probably cheat then next time instead of studying more if they failed a test.     3     For the fixed mindset students, there was hardly any. They ran from error. They didn’t engage with it. But the students with the growth mindset engaged deeply, exhibiting increased electrical activity in their brains. They processed the error and learned from it.

    4     First of all, we can praise wisely. Praise the process that kids engage in: their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. We can also change students’ mindsets. Research found that students who were not taught growth mindset continued to show declining grades.     5    

7 . According to A Guide for Families by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, children, preteens, and teens can lie for varying reasons.    1     Their upsetting situations could include failing a class. and other struggles with things about themselves or fitting in with their peers.

    2    . This is not to say that lying is acceptable, but the less parents take it personally, the more they can calmly and constructively help their child. Children and teens who fall into anxiety easily will use lying as an unhealthy coping strategy.

What should a parent or caregiver do? Try to keep in mind that kids can be quite self-absorbed and they often don’t understand how hurtful lies can be. With this in mind, here are a few tips to help promote truthfulness in your child at any age.

    3     If you overreact, then you are just building a barrier between you and your child, Calmly discuss or lecture about honesty and dishonesty and why they chose to lie.     4    Your understanding may not be able to stop your teen from creating those everyday lies, but you can convey that there are other options available.

Keep in mind that addressing lying behaviours is a process not a quick fix.    5     But if you keep your own emotion positively, your child or teen is more likely to eventually open up.

While in the short term you may just get a shrug, keeping yourself calm to create a sense of emotional safety will help your voice of truth and reason be heard throughout their lives.

8 . It’s an unconventional setting. Children of varying ages are reading actively. Seated next to them are teenagers, many of them girls, staring at the Hindi alphabet(字母表)on the blackboard. In charge of this class are three young girls, not much older than their students. But when Tabassum, Tarannum and Rubina, no more than 22, start speaking, you know the difference. Their confidence takes you by surprise.

A little over 10 kilometres from Varanasi lies the village of Sajoi where illiteracy(文 盲)was quite common. It had blocked out modernity until recently, especially when it came to its women. Educating girls was considered pointless, and the possibility of women stepping out of their homes, unthinkable.

Things began to change in 2010 when Human Welfare Association (HWA), identified Sajoi for a planned intervention. HWA set up a centre in Sajoi to offer free education but the villagers needed to be convinced to join in. The organization needed volunteers who valued education. Tabassum, Tarannum and Rubina embraced the opportunity.

After completing their high school education, the girls set out on another important mission-persuading the locals to send their children to schools. “We went knocking at every door, talking to elders, “recalls Rubina. Some villagers asked them to mind their own business. “We didn’t let all this distract our attention from the main goal, ” Rubina says.

The girls honed their approach. They didn’t ask people to stop their children from working, but urged them to send them to schools for an hour or two. Slowly, children started trickling(缓 慢增加)in. Motivational Learning Centre, as the girls call it, is no replacement for school. It is there, in fact, that they create the hunger for knowledge. It also helps school-going children so they don’t lose interest and drop out.

Those who doubted the girls’ intentions now recommend the centre to others. The number of admissions to schools has steadily increased and the dropout rate in Sajoi has fallen.

9 . Education today really isn’t that much different from what it was a hundred years ago. It’s still classrooms full of students all learning the same thing at the same pace from teachers who spend thirty years teaching more or less the same thing.

However, the world that the next generation will grow up in will be different from anything we have seen. It will be a world filled with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, automation, virtual reality, personalized medicine, self-driving cars, and people on Mars; a world where people might not even have jobs and where society itself may be arranged in fundamentally different ways. How are we supposed to know how to prepare them to succeed in a world that we cannot predict?

It starts by rethinking what a school is. The role of school should no longer be to fill heads with information, rather it should be a place that inspires students to be curious about the world they live in. Don’t hold back that curiosity by making them spend their childhoods preparing for one test after another.

The ability to adapt and learn something new should be valued above all else. Gone are the days when you pick a profession and just do that one thing for the rest of your life. People will need to know how to learn something new multiple times over in their lives because our knowledge of the world and who we are is progressing incredibly quickly. If the last time you learned anything new was when you were in school then you will be missing out on the new ways of understanding the world.

In addition, education should give people an understanding that the world is not divided up into different subjects. All fields of knowledge bleed into each other and none can be fully understood in isolation (孤立).

Much of this may seem idealistic or unrealistic, but change is needed if we are going to figure out how to live in the future.

10 . Learning doesn’t have to end when people age. In fact, today’s seniors want to remain socially engaged, intellectually stimulated (智力上活跃的), and an active part of their communities according to The American University Beirut (AUB) in Lebanon, That’s why AUB opened The University for Seniors that gives older adults—50 and up—an opportunity for lifelong learning.

“The goal of the program is to establish a community for seniors to learn for life, most of whom are retirees,” Mira Zaatari, the program assistant manager told Al-Fanar Media. “They can stay engaged physically and mentally here.”

The university includes two three-month semesters and students can take any class they want regardless of their educational level. There are no exams or graduation certificates. This school is all about lifelong learning. The available classes include political science, public health, agriculture, sciences, women’s affairs as well as creative classes about drawing, painting and music. Language classes include English, French and Spanish. The classes are taught by volunteers, including AUB professors, students, and doctors from the university’s hospital.

Seniors can gain a host of benefits by continuing to learn new things. According to Aging Well, that’s because lifelong learning keeps the brain stimulated, challenged and fully engaged. “This helps seniors remain mentally alert while they age. In fact, when people learn new things, the brain—even an older brain—can form new connections and pathways,” it adds.

Keeping physically active is important and so is keeping social connections. That’s why the university provides more than just education.

Former banker Youssef Bakri, 84, has been a student for over 10 years. He pointed out that before the pandemic the university garden was used as a meeting place for socialization and that there were organized field trips.

With the percentage of over 65s in Lebanon’s population growing and the fact that many of these seniors live alone without family members in the country, The University for Seniors is playing a very important role in the lives of its students.