What are we teaching children for?

While there are many pockets of the world where access to education requires serious attention, issues of quality and relevance are cross cutting. This is the more reason why the world governing body - the United Nations has in its 17 Sustainable Development Goals the commitment to raise the quality of education across the globe.

The big question is what are we teaching the children for? Is it teaching for acquisition of knowledge for its own sake or is it teaching empowerment agenda enabling young people to navigate and grapple with real life issues confronting the world they live in? Conscious of the urgent need to grow and nurture a repertoire of the 21st century skills ranging from self confidence, collaboration and team building, problem solving, entrepreneurship and interpersonal communication abilities, to name but a few. Curriculum framers are hard at work trying to make education a worthy pursuit - some kind of panacea to problems bedeviling the world.