A Rethinking on Education

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…