Key points from “Education Moves the World” August Conference 2024
The Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine held the August Conference 2024, “Education Moves the World,” on August 26. Oksana Lyutik, General Manager at Zminotvortsi, was a guest at the event, while methodologists Tymur Demchuk and Petro Chornomorets were panel speakers.
During the “Extracurricular Education” panel, Petro Chornomorets discussed the goals of “Zminotvortsi,” the essence of our project, and the importance of extracurricular education.
Here are some key points from the speech:
“Zminotvortsi" does not focus on content, as it can easily be found online. Instead, content serves as a foundation for interaction, allowing young people to connect with experts in their fields who aren’t traditional teachers. These are individuals who are actively engaged in their professions. We create our project to allow teenagers to interact with such people.
Every teacher is an individual who needs to be themselves in this interaction. That’s why it’s very challenging for us to create a standardized learning system.
Our main upcoming challenge:
- 20,000 high school students each year;
- ensuring that the people working with teenagers are not professional teachers;
- maintaining consistently high-quality lessons while allowing each instructor to remain true to themselves.
This is our first pilot year. We currently have around 60 instructors working with approximately 400 high school students, and we expect to grow.
We don’t know what the future will hold or what things will look like in three or twenty years. So, in reality, we don’t have a precise solution. That’s why all future-oriented processes mustn’t be centralized.
Advice for parents:
The most successful people are those who find their optimal place and path, not those who strictly follow the standard route. Extracurricular education is precisely about this. It’s quite possible that for your teenager, it might be much more effective to slightly “let go” of school and focus on the things they excel at. So, if you’re worried about your child’s future, consider what will help them more — doing what they love or learning something just because they were told to do so.