Your child’s education

Yogesh Khosla
As the session is coming to an end and your child is preparing for the “end of the session” Exams, it is time for you to reflect on how your child is doing. Are you one of those majority of parents, who are not at all happy about their children’s progress, about the education imparted in the schools or about the state of education on the whole. Can something be done to bring desirable changes ?
First of all, it is essential to know why we need to get educated and what constitutes “good” education? For most of us, education trains and prepares us for a fruitful career when we grow up. While this may not be a bad aim to have, is this sufficient? What if a child grows up to become a very good engineer and a great CEO in a MNC but is not able to cope up with the pressures of daily life. Take the most recent example of the tragic suicide by the brilliant MD of Tata Motors  Karl Slym. Slym got the best of education from the best of international institutions (MBA from Stanford) but what a way to end life. Take the death of Best Actor Oscar Award winner Philip Hoffman, who was recently found dead in his New York apartment, apparently due to an overdose  of drugs, at a relatively young age of 47. Perhaps good education could have prepared them better to cope up with whatever  was troubling them. This brings us to the question of desirable “ams of education”.
UNESCO report of “International Commission on Education for the Twenty First Century” popularly known as Delor’s Report- titled “Learning : The Treasure Within”, gives broad guidelines about what a good modern education should aim at. The report says that if modern  education is to succeed in its tasks of preparing competent youth for the future, curriculum should be restructured around four pillars of learning- learning to Know, Learning to Do, Learning to Be and Learning to Live Together. Thereafter, concern to renew curriculum has been at the heart of worldwide efforts in improving the quality of education. Before moving forward we should be clear about what the term “curriculum” means. Curriculum is much wider in scope than the syllabus and includes all the educational activities going on  in your child’s school- the content of what is to be taught, the knowledge, skills and attitudes which are to be deliberately fostered, together with methods of teaching and materials to be used and the methods and techniques of evaluation to test child’s progress.
NCERT’s National Curriculum Framework – 2005 is an attempt in India  to restructure curriculum to address the competencies required for the modern times. Adopted by the Central Advisory Board of Education in Sept, 2005, this framework now forms the basis of school education in India. Main features of NCF- 2005 are revolutionary and can surely bring deisrable changes and the much needed reforms to bring India at par with the best in the world. This essay is an attempt to demystify the technical educational aspects which constitute “good” education so that the parents   and the children can make informed choices and can perhaps demand “Right to right education” from the schools.
Primacy of the learner is today the central theme of good education wherein the teacher is required to be a facilitator rather than a knowall provider of knowledge. Modern teachers are required to help the child to “construct knowledge”- using the child’s daily experiences and using her previous knowledge about the people and about the environment. Active participation of the learner in the process of learning is required-through questioning, doubting, thinking critically. Focus today is on understanding rather than on rote learning. At premium are the qualities like analysis, creative problem solving, original thinking. Cultivation of much heralded “good memory”, which has been the pillar of Indian education for centuries, is today not a very desirable quality to aim for. To help our children to become truly intelligent, we need to teach them the basic skill of Awareness  with total Attention-attentive observation, attentive listening, attentive living. Teachers and the schools, which are not promoting these aspects are causing great harm and are definitely not giving good education.
Learning without burden is another essential modern requirement in school education. All the Theories of Learning stress that good learning can not take place in stressful atmosphere. Learning, to be meaningful, must be joyful. Yashpal Committee considered this aspect of education in its report titled Learning Without Burden and recommends major changes in the design of syllabi and textbooks, in the methods of teaching, in the overall social ethos which forces  children to become aggressively competitive and exhibit precocity. As we shall soon consider, there is much more to education than the present skewed focus on scholastic areas.
Examination Reforms :  At present, the whole process of education revolves around examinations. Teachers teach for exams, learner study only for exams, libraries are stuffed with Question Banks and Sample Papers. Games and Art classes are suspended when exams are near. Schools advertise good Board results. For education to change, the whole process of testing and examinations needs to be redesigned. Examination Reforms  are now underway in all Examination Boards to change this distorted high position enjoyed by exams. Doing away with one “end of the session” exam is a step in the right direction. Marks are being replaced by Grades (same Grade for a range of marks). Testing is now spread over the whole session and includes a mix of Summative and Formative Tests. Summative Tests are designed to test the knowledge acquired in a term of six months. Formative Tests are designed as continuous testing tools in the form of class tests, group discussions, home assignments, projects, and many other testing tools. Formative tests are useful as they are immediate, diagnostic and remedial. Board  exams are becoming optional- assessment by the schools being  given more and more weightage. All this is being done to reduce the fear and stress which exams  traditionally bring. Under the new continuous evaluation system academic excellence is possible only through regular/daily study at home, not only at the time of terminal exams, as testing and evaluation is always taking place.
This brings us to the much neglected co-scholastic areas. Schools appear to be doing their small, even though highly insufficient, bit in the all important areas of Art (Music, Dance, Drama, Drawing, Painting) and Health  and Physical Education (Games, NCC, Yoga etc). For holistic development of children, participation in one or the other form of Art and in some game, is absolutely essential. Training in these areas requires specialists who are not only the masters in their fields but also have a deep understanding of why and what is to be taught and how to impart training to young  kids. Performance of children in these areas is the real verdict on the capabilities of the trainers.
Let us now turn our attention to perhaps the most important but, sadly the totally non-existent training in the two vital pillars of modern education. Learning to Be and Learning to Live Together. Full understanding of these areas requires detailed study in a separate  essay but the fundamentals can be considered here.  As we discussed at the start of this essay, something is missing in how we educate our children. Look at the disintegrating human beings all around us, the conflicts at home, at work, between communities and nations, the ever present spectre of war. Greed which is at the root of all corruption, selfish motives, acquisition of more and more and still more of everything, are  sickening. This is the true face of our society. Training in the development of an integrated human being-free of fears and anxieties, free of violence and conflicts, having a good IQ and a good EQ, capable of living together in happy relationships, is real education. This training, which in the past, was in the domain of society-wise people in the society, some well meaning intelligent parents and family elders, is today the responsibility of schools. And the factual position is that hardly any school is equipped today to teach the new areas like Life Skills, Value Education and the cultivation of right Attitudes. Training in these areas will, in the future, differentiate between the ordinary and  the good schools. Parents are well advised to see that their wards are not deprived of these skills, which the author believes, are as important as the scholastics.
(The author is former Principal of MHAC School Nagbani)

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