“The whole art of teaching is only the art of arousing the natural curiosity of young minds in order to satisfy it afterwards.” – Anatole France
The purpose of education is to create responsible, productive and socially contributing citizens, people who can support their own families and contribute to their communities. As Toffler says, education in the 21st century should allow people to learn, unlearn and relearn. But I am not sure that our schools and universities are committed to this.
Education is one of the least scientific human endeavors. He is doing well in school to get into a good university and get a good degree. A good degree is supposed to be a passport to a good job. Based on your educational qualifications, you can rise to a reasonably high position without having to demonstrate any exceptional ability.
Beyond that, however, you may run into problems. There is no established link between their performance in school and their performance at a job. Even more important, there is no link between your performance at work and your performance in life.
To be true to purpose, education must help a child develop three fundamental capabilities:
1. Discover, develop and continuously evolve a vision to become a useful member of society:
Many of us have an advantage: our parents envision our future for us, which drives us to work toward this vision. However, this is not so common among the poor. The educational system has to step in to help everyone create this vision and develop even poor children’s confidence to pursue the vision.
Balaji Sampath, who runs Eureka Child, an NGO committed to improving literacy and math skills in public schools, told us a moving story in this context. Returning from the US to do something significant in education, he immersed himself in local issues by spending a few months in a town. He was in a village classroom when a boy asked the teacher if it was possible to go to the moon. “You and I can’t fly to the moon,” replied the teacher. “But scientists in the United States can…” We must stop robbing our children of goals and dreams.
2. Understands that questions are more important than answers:
Our educational system places an undue emphasis on providing answers, often to questions that children do not have. In other words, too often we teach children concepts without context; we need to show them why learning is important. We need to focus on sparking children’s natural curiosity and teaching them to love learning. A good way to do this is to place children in natural experiences or games where they can ask questions. In these environments, learning is immediate and strong. Learning can be a structured discovery process, offering students varied learning outcomes, just as our situations and decisions later in life offer different outcomes.
For example, an NGO in Mumbai went to schools with an experiment to teach students about water conservation. The students measured the amount of water consumed while brushing their teeth with the tap on and then again with the tap off. Imagine, if we all learn this kind of lesson in school, how we can apply the principles to so many other aspects of our home and work later in life.
3. Learn to learn:
The world is evolving too fast for schools and universities to keep up. What is being taught is inadequate and outdated, or soon will be. It is important that children are encouraged to discover the answers for themselves, through the Internet, by experimenting, and by having access to experts at the forefront of each field.
It is important for students to learn the scientific method –
(a) create a hypothesis based on observations,
(b) design and conduct experiments to prove or disprove these hypotheses, and
(c) draw conclusions recognizing that the conclusions might change with additional information.
With the level of knowledge available in today’s world, it’s also important to exercise judgment about what to learn, and how and when you need to learn it. We need to teach children when to trust their own judgments and when to trust the experience of others. Our children need to learn that even when you outsource the effort, you retain responsibility for the outcome.
What do you think? Do you agree with these ideas about the critical skills our children need? Is our education system addressing this? Share your thoughts and experiences with all of us.