Reforming Education System

To reform the education system we need to overturn all the assumptions on which it is based. Students should work in a free, non-coercive environment which is totally devoid of fear, punishment, comparison and competition and they should be allowed to pursue their interests and aspirations rather than those of the parents and society  

Make learning stimulating
Kanwarjit Bindra

THE purpose of education is to make sense of the world around us. Most child psychologists agree that learning a language for the first time is the most difficult neuro-physiological task the child will ever do in his/her life but the child does it effortlessly without much direct help of the parents.
The learning model they follow has no fixed curriculum, no fixed time and no fixed space for learning. They just learn all the time and for them learning is not separated from life. They have no fear of making mistakes and in fact they self-correct themselves after listening to others. They learn at their own pace and in fact learning difficulties (like stammering) originate when over-zealous parents start interfering with the natural learning pace of children and start correcting them.
This early childhood learning model can serve as a basis for further education of children but modern schools work on a totally opposite model and that is why learning slows down as children start going to school.
True education should help us make “conscious” and informed choices about our lives. These could be about our career, about our life partner, about where and how we want to lead our lives and many other important decisions. To make these choices one must find out what one really likes to do and what one’s hopes and aspirations are.
In fact, India’s ancient traditions of learning encouraged a rigorous learning for the discovery of self. Needless to say, modern education gives no importance to this aspect and actually induces individuals to suppress or downgrade their own interests and aspirations so that they can implement the projects designed for the economy or even by the government. Education must treat children as the masters of their destiny, as persons capable of taking charge of their lives rather than being passive objects that can be moulded and fitted into a previously determined framework.
Schools do not allow real learning to take place because they are based on totally wrong assumptions. It is assumed that children don’t want to learn on their own and they will not work with discipline and rigour without the use of force. Further, it is believed that children learn only when they stay with others of the same age and learning ends when one grows up.
These assumptions imply that learning is separated from life. The truth is that all children are talented but we squander their talent quite ruthlessly. Learning is in our genes but the problem is that different children want to learn different things. When we force them to learn something they are not interested in at that time, they respond with their own strategies of coping with the given situation. Such a coercive situation leads to minimal learning.
Learning takes place in a comfortable, loving and trustful environment but schools convey a message of distrust and contempt to students. Children belonging to poor families have to face additional debilitating conditions, which make learning even more difficult and such that they eventually drop out of school. They are given the impression that their parents are more interested in using their children to earn money rather than to educate them. Their experience, skills and background are given no importance. The high dropout rate of students in villages is often because they find the school boring and much below their high expectations. The government and the beaurocracy find it convenient to attribute the high dropout rates to parental poverty and apathy. Even the children in cities feel happier outside the school but their parents don’t give them the option of leaving the school.
Let us now critically analyse some of the salient features of our education system. Our education system follows a uniform curriculum. This assumes that all children of the same age have same needs and interests and therefore need to know the same information and learn at the same pace. By forcing children to become good at subjects they dislike, we affect their learning in subjects or topics they like.
Another sacred cow in our education system is the notion that competition, rather than cooperation, is critical for learning to take place. Competition creates learning difficulties in children who don’t do as well as other children by lowering their self-esteem and self-worth. But it is even more harmful to successful children in the long run because it conveys a message to them that learning is not for oneself but for some external reasons like marks, job, etc.
The purpose of education is to prepare a child towards life-long learning but competitive people stop learning when an external stimulation ceases. Children learn a lot from each other but competition makes every child an enemy of every other child and this does not allow shared learning to take place.
Moreover, learning is always a cooperative endeavour where a person builds up on knowledge he has learnt from others directly or indirectly through books, people and different kinds of media. To encourage competition we use examinations as a way to evaluate the students. Our examinations encourage rote learning. Isn’t memorising answers and forgetting very soon afterwards “cheating” which our system legitimises and encourages?
Road towards reform
The National Curricular Framework 2005 prepared by the NCERT has talked in detail about problems and has suggested many ways to reform the system but these have not been implemented. However, most of the recent discussion on the proposed reforms has not focussed on the type of environment which facilitates the learning process.
Let’s start with parents, who hold the key to reforms because schools just respond to desires of parents. Most of the parents are caught up in the rat race. They have fears about their future and their children’s future and their experience tells them that earning a living and being happy are not possible in today’s world. Because of this fear they are not willing to take risks and challenge the existing system or seek alternatives.
The role of the teacher is to facilitate the natural learning process of the students by creating a conducive learning environment, where children get enough opportunities to question, challenge, experiment, reflect and internalise their learning. For this the training and motivation of teachers is very important.
Most of the teachers work under the compulsion to earn a living and this compulsion can be converted into a choice by giving them autonomy to frame their own curriculum and plan their own activities. They should be encouraged to share their interests and skills with children and allowed to innovate keeping in mind the local needs and environment. This will improve their self-esteem and keep them happy, which is essential for their productive involvement.
Our economic system is quite happy with the current education system since it is producing workers for them. Independent thinking people are a threat to the economic system since they might question the status quo. Children need the reforms urgently but they have absolutely no say. They cannot even decide what books should be purchased for their school libraries.
To reform the education system we need to overturn all the assumptions on which it is based. Students should work in a free, non-coercive environment which is totally devoid of fear, punishment, comparison and competition and they should be allowed to pursue their interests and aspirations rather than those of the parents and society. Schools should emphasise experience rather than textbook learning and teach skills involved in using our hands.
Learning must be rooted in their immediate surroundings, concerning their daily lives and children must be encouraged to participate in community projects like watershed projects, forest regeneration programmes, check dams, rainwater harvesting, compost pits and biogas plants and many other such projects.
Education must be in the local language so that the child understands what he is learning and stays firmly rooted to his culture. All kinds of local resources like crafts, dance, music, pottery, weaving, theatre, puppetry and others can be integrated in the learning process.
The children should be exposed to other regional and international languages as each language functions as a window to a particular culture. Teachers need to be given autonomy to design their curriculum which suits the needs of the students. The management of schools must be decentralised and the community should be involved. We need to move even from “child-centred education” to child self-directed learning.

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