Are we educating children for the world they inherited, or the world they are about to enter? What happens when a child can swipe before they can write and a tablet can produce a perfect sentence, but holding a pencil feels like hard work?
When the classroom has smart boards, digital resources and artificial intelligence, yet we are still asking whether children are learning how to think, create, communicate and solve problems?
These questions are no longer distant but already sitting in our classrooms.
Every Saturday, Oluwatobiloba Okonufua will be answering some questions that have bothered many people on PENS & STICKS, a new educational column that looks at the changing face of learning and the things we may be gaining, losing or simply doing differently along the way. Because education is changing.
Across Africa, schools are embracing tablets, smart boards and digital learning tools, while some families in the Western world are looking towards African educational environments for what they consider a stronger, more rounded foundation.
Homeschooling is no longer simply an alternative for a handful of families, while Montessori education continues to attract attention. Cambridge and British curricula are increasingly part of the conversation, even when their approaches to delivery can differ significantly.
So, who got it right? Perhaps that is the wrong question.
The more useful question may be: what works for the child, the community and the world that child is preparing to enter? That is where PENS & STICKS come in.
The column will explore the tension between the old and the new without automatically declaring one the winner.
Should handwriting still matter when children can type faster than they can write?
Can technology improve learning without replacing the human connection that makes teaching meaningful?
Can Western educational models be successfully transplanted into African classrooms, or should they be adapted to fit our realities?
And in an increasingly digital world, what happens to the values, creativity, discipline and practical skills that helped previous generations learn?
These are not merely questions for teachers, they concern parents, school owners, policymakers, education administrators and, most importantly, the children whose future we are designing.
For Okonufua, the conversation is personal as well as professional. With more than 20 years of experience spanning education, administration and media, she has seen how learning, communication and leadership intersect.
Her interest in education has grown from a simple concern: that some of the values and skills children need are quietly disappearing while we rush towards everything new.
She believes children must have room to create, question, explore and express themselves but that progress should not require us to throw away everything that once worked. Most likely why the name Pens and Sticks feels appropriate.
The pen represents what we have always known: writing, discipline, foundational skills, patience and the physical act of learning while the stick suggests something more basic, more adaptable and perhaps more African — the ingenuity of learning with whatever is available.
Put them together and you have a conversation about education that refuses to choose between yesterday and tomorrow.
That conversation begins this Saturday.
PENS down? Not quite. The STICKS are coming too.
