What
can be called as education? ‘Apparently’, educating someone a piece of
knowledge.
What
we see is generally children do nothing particular up to 3 or 4 years after
birth. Then with a certain outfit they go somewhere called ‘school’. Where they
suddenly get exposed NEWLY to specific terms like science, social science,
language, experiments, homework, and EXAMS etc without even knowing what they
are, what they are for, why do we hear it (rather than ‘learn’ it).
They
go on with the same subject and learning structure for the next 12 years. By
then they categorize subjects into easy, tough, good, bad, great, good for
nothing, useful, idle. They categorize themselves into mainly intelligent or
imbecile and they assign characters for each category. What intelligent people
would do, would be interested in, what subject they must (rather than
would) choose next (in brief THEY GET BIASED). In the next level -for us HSS-
they will label them permanently into science, humanities or commerce stream;
according to their so called intelligence (I don’t generalize it since there
are a lot of students who chase their interests than what they are told; but
this is the TREND seen).
Hence
in the queue for further studies if at all a person with more than ~90% mark
chooses a subject like history, biology, language or politics the immediate
questions he/she faces are ‘you have good marks,
why do you choose so?’, ‘why don’t you choose
engineering or medicine, you are intelligent’ so on!
Why
is it so? Don’t we need ‘intelligent’
people to guide our upcoming neutrino observatory? , to investigate
geographical structures and hence agriculture? , to change political system
according to the era? , to control train?, to care about needs of people?, to
teach the next generation?, for a creative art form???
How
do we reduce the discrepancy in the value/position/ respect given to
engineering and history? Both deal entirely different ideas so how do we even
compare both in terms of value/position! Don’t they have unique properties of
their own?
That’s
when I started thinking about a ‘new’ ‘school education system’, modifying the
existing one. Certainly the existing education systems like DPEP, SSA are appreciative.
Still how about an alternative way of learning/educating children?
Now we have 5 sections as KG,LP,UP,HS,HSS (with a
term 2,4,3,3,2 years) in the new section we will have 4 sections. Briefly it looks
like this (The term is not mentioned).
In
the 1st section we (students) do not study ‘subjects’ but an idea -how do we
analyse things scientifically, various experiments, data collection and
transforming it into an informative form (it includes languages, literature,
science, environment, life skills etc). (Say ask children; to
collect stones-if stone A is more similar to stone B than stone C-What made you
think so?- the properties-where do you find it-how often you find it). Also we could have a section for thought experiments.
2nd
section: we sort things into various ‘subjects’ depending on gadgets needed for
studying, objects/ideas we deal with, say art, science, literature, life skills
and so on. Each could have subcategories. (if
you have stone, water, leaves ask them to categorize in all possible ways –with
explanation- it could be stone, water, leaves together forming earthly
materials (geography/agriculture) or leaves and stone water being alive and not
alive (biology) or leaves and stone together then water since solid and liquid
(physics/chemistry))
3rd:
we study those subject as we have in UP and HS right now. Additionally camps/seminars held by scientists in which they will learn more about science, social science etc via games or tours or random walks (say, a walk to a mountain could help them to learn about the formations of rocks with the help of a geologist)
4th:
we take majors minors (provided certain conditions like, a person who takes
physics must take mathematics also); where we won’t have groups like science or
humanities, so that a person who learns physics can also have history as a
minor subject.
Then
further higher studies…
