The Future of Education

The educational transformation of a city can only be achieved with the joint efforts of all actors of the society, in concordance with this premise, the project is developed in partnership with public, private and academic actors. The public actors are responsible for giving legitimacy to the project, resources and sustainability. Privates contribute with resources, administration and management. Academic actors have the expertise and knowledge to improve the quality and coverage of education from preschool to higher education.

According to this, the Project has several components:

1)     Social, Civic and Emotional Skills: Children and adolescents need a balanced set of cognitive, social and emotional skills, in order to succeed in modern life. Some of the important social and emotional skills are malleable during childhood and adolescence (Andreas Schleicher OECD 2015). The school must not only deal with traditional cognitive issues, but also to create learning environments and development of social, civic and emotional skills. Therefore the alliance adopted a model for active teaching in public schools , where social and emotional skills are lived day by day in the classrooms , through teachers training and support strategies, providing teaching materials and monitoring;

2)     Strengthening of Language and Mathematics: In addition to training in social, civic and emotional competencies, it is necessary that children have a solid foundation of language and mathematics. Therefore, different interventions have been made with experimental methods, identifying the best ones in a cost/benefit perspective;

3)     Access to Higher Education:  K - 11 Education is critical to the development of people, however, the best job opportunities are opened when there is a vocational and/or professional training for students. The alliance developed a program that significantly increased the access to technical professional careers for the students;

4)     Consolidation of Manizales as a University and Educational City: The partnership has defined that some interventions must be framed in a model of development based on knowledge. Our city must transcend the agrarian vocation to a vocation of knowledge. Therefore, the alliance is working on consolidating Manizales as the most important University City of Colombia.