On 75th Independence Day, are we free?
Free from the ancient methods afflicting the present system, especially education!
Gone are the days of restrictive schooling. Of course, nowhere anybody uses the word ‘restrictive’ but that’s what it amounts to and comes across. Education is a realm where everyone had a different viewpoint and everyone seem to put forward and force their opinions, right from governments to teachers to parents. One basic they all forget is, education comes from learning and learning requires freedom.
Better education is a myth
Education, it has to be weighed in terms of quality, can never be termed as good or bad. But learning can be.
More tests, more homework, more regulation, long study hours, longer school hours, less freedom, less leisure, never meant your child is getting a better education. The above you meant that your child is believed and coerced to be in the cage that kills their imaginative and creative skills. More schooling or more laborious schooling is never better than less schooling or less laborious schooling.
We all talk about “schooling” and “education” with much glory, hardly do we talk about actual learning. Schooling is good, but nothing counts as a piece of great evidence that supports more schooling is directly proportional to more learning. Students don’t need to study more subjects, study the same syllabus and take the same tests; each student is different.
Teaching along with technology will bring about the much-needed transformation
What’s also needed is realization.
Learning to change student behaviour and the education system requires more than understanding the pedagogy of teaching content, it is a journey of realization. It is a journey that involves teachers and parents to suspend hitherto held norms and encourage individualized learning. Only when we believe and implement personalized education, is when we will achieve true Independence.
Whatever happened to the idea that children learn through creativity and freedom of choice? Jean Piaget’s psychological theory of learning, suggests that learning is an active process controlled by the learner, and only motivated by curiosity. Educators everywhere always support such theories but only in theory, practically, everywhere teaching somehow has resulted in a lack of qualitative assessment and promotion of one-size-fits-all coaching methods.
With systems that believe in cramming and not practising to learn and to score well in examinations, we deprive students of opportunities to explore and experience.
It’s time we get freedom from:
- Traditional methods of studying
- Cramming, and mugging it all up
- The feeling of being under pressure
- The feeling of being unheard
Let’s prepare a world where students don’t achieve grades through the standard procedures, where they know how to get the right answer only through clarity of concepts and not cramming, and where students just don’t know the right answer but also understand the right answer.
View this post on Instagram
Also published on Medium.