BREAK DOWN THE WALLS

At the social level, “unrealistic and premature” ambitions of parents and other adults stifle creativity and curiosity of the child. There is lot of hype about examinations, top scores, entrance tests, careers and coaching that confound the child. At school level, “curriculum transaction is predominantly information-oriented and memory-based”. The situation calls for “reinventing school education”. There is global shift in emphasis from content delivery to capacity building in school education. This leads to learner autonomy and creates anywhere, anytime, and life-time learning. There is shift from top-down, prescriptive model of curriculum to constructive, non-linear approach where teachers are encouraged to enrich curriculum by going beyond the text books. As a result of current practice of ‘instructionism’, learning is confined to prescribed text books. De-emphasise memorisation. Encourage thinking, understanding, exploration, problem solving and creativity. Teacher facilitating the learners to reflect, analyse and interpret in the process of knowledge construction. Redefine the role of the teacher from a ‘giver’ or ‘instructor’ to ‘facilitator’ and ‘co-learner’. Questioning is basic to all learning and non-questioning mind is sterile. “Can we allot some marks in our tests to questioning skills”?

To learn something is seek out answers. When knowledge gained is not acknowledged, and the text book is considered the sole source of answers, education becomes a foreign language. A student’s identity is reduced to that of a mark or a grade, compared with other ‘marks’ or ‘grades’.

The existing pedagogy, by and large with very little change, is what schools followed 100 years ago. There is the classroom, the blackboard and the teacher in the front speaking to the class. Children are expected to largely listen for hours. In senior classes, the situation is worse. Repetition and rote learning rule. Educational institutions have no choice but to move towards Active Learning, away from passive presence in the classroom. Active Learning can enrich the system and students.

As centres of higher education, the universities in Kerala has to improve a lot. Faculty Performance Evaluation must be an annual affair. Academic Journals to publish serious academic works must be part of the system.

In a conventional classroom, every learner is subjected to the same set of lectures in the same way for the same duration. In the end, a few learners shine, some survive and the rest are left behind. Our formal education system is the best example. This is how we end up with 10 percent employability in our graduates after a decade and half of formal education. Our higher education system thrives on a steady diet of uninspiring classroom lectures. Contrast this with adaptive learning, which views attainment of competency as its central goal, the duration of learning being largely irrelevant. It recognises every learner as unique and creates a personalised and optimised learning pathway for each of them. Eg. Video lessons, Mentoring sessions, Exercises, etc.

At no stage is a student encouraged to develop further curiosity in a subject and those who do stumble up on their passion or interest do so more by chance than design. Most Indian schools – be they government, private or elite schools in the metros – fail to give their students real education. They manage to make them literate, in some cases even articulate, but they fail to educate them. The school experience leaves students cold and they want to somehow get it over with.

India is a skill deficit nation where 12 per cent of its population is skilled and only 2 percent receive any formal skill training in any employable trade. A ‘skill movement’ should take place from school level.

“It is no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you will get a good job, and it is becoming less true with each passing decade”. What is important is skills in areas which cannot be computerised .

“Career Guidance is assisting an individual to discover what he/she is best at. It will eventually result in self-realisation and self-actualisation”. Directory service is of no use. So do going after INTERESTS. APTITUDES should be tested. According to a recent statistics, while 86 percent of students are very concerned about which option to choose for higher education, 92 per cent of them don’t get any career-related guidance from their schools. How will parents know what is right for their children? There is a serious dearth of guidance counsellors, compared to the number of students in India. There are only 500 counsellors for about 1.5 million students. (“Career Guidance Handbook”, 2016 ) ed .

Indian innovation has long way to go. The education system hampers the natural innovativeness of Indians.

Kerala State Council for Science, Technology, and Environment has decided to roll out innovation clubs in select schools in the state. Idea boxes will be set up in these institutions.

Education system in the state had failed to emphasize the importance of innovation. The council was launching 1000 innovation clubs in schools and colleges in Kerala.

IISER@ School programme launched by IISER, Trivandrum to inculcate scientific temper in students, encourage scientific research, introduce high school students to the world of science through experiments and demonstrations that will instil appreciation of science in young minds.

In today’s wired world, the most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination. Because what your kids imagine, they can now act on farther, faster, and cheaper than ever before – as individuals. If I just have the spark of an idea now, I can get a designer in Taiwan to design it. I can get a factory in China to produce a prototype. I can get a factory in Vietnam to mass manufacture it. I can use Amazon.com to handle fulfilment. I use freelancer.com to find someone to do my logo and manage my backroom. And I can do all this at incredibly low prices. The one thing that is not a commodity and never will be is that spark of an idea.

Mr.C. Ravindranath, Minister for Education, Govt. of Kerala is preparing to provide Laptop, LCD Projector, Internet connection, Centralised Computer Lab, Wi-Fi internet connection to all class rooms from 8th standard to 12th standard in the government and aided schools in Kerala at a cost of Rs.600 crores. idea.