Or
The
Seven Myths That Make Education Difficult To Improve
See Myth # 1 of 7 here.
Myth # 2 – All children must attend school every day
If you’re from a poor family, there’s a lot
more to life than just attending school! Siblings and domestic animals have to
be cared for, parents have to be helped, essentials such as water or firewood
have to be fetched, birds and animals kept away from the farm, you may need to
migrate with your parents…. It’s not necessary that all this is a waste – in
fact, despite the shadow child labour, a lot of this is also learning for
life. Children who are in a position to attend daily too might learn a lot if they
spent a day or two every week doing things other than school – such as tending
to gardens, pursuing a passion, trying to earn something by putting their
learning to use, solving a neigbhourhood problem, helping their siblings and
parents, making things…. Or helping their underprivileged classmates so that they
can spend more time in school.
The kind of focused (and therefore limited)
scholastic learning our ‘advanced’ children end up doing has resulted in
several luminaries pointing out that (even from institutions such as the IITs)
our graduates are ‘unemployable’. One might add they haven’t developed many
other aspects of their personality – including civic consciousness.
However, what this requirement of daily
attendance does is to marginalize great numbers of children, since the
teaching-learning process tends to be sequential (rather than re-iterative). If
you miss out an earlier part, you can’t ‘keep up with the class’ and slowly
head for being left out or pushed out or dropping out. Effectively, the school
is saying: if you are poor and cannot attend regularly (as the we require), you
shall not learn. Instead of: attend when you can, we’ll find a way to support
you and make sure you learn (which is what the business of the school really
is).
There are
a few walk-in centres in the country (though of course only for poor and/or
working children) and some of them do manage to attract and keep children for a
long time even though there is no compulsion to attend. That kind of
flexibility is perhaps too much to hope for in the school system. Enabling the
school to be more responsive to children’s real living situations, though –
that’s both possible and desirable. It needs a spiraling rather than linear
flow, a variety and range of materials, and providing children engaging
activities in many of which they will work on their own, and the use of a tracking
system to keep record of progress. This gels with every provision of the RTE,
with expectations put forward in our National Curriculum Framework, and much
that contemporary understanding of pedagogy tells us. However, to make it
happen what we need is not methods and materials but a way to get rid of this
myth and the fear that everything will fall apart if the school seeks to respond
(by adapting to children’s needs) rather than coerce (by making children adjust
to its needs).
Any
suggestions?
Tomorrow, Myth # 3 of 7
PS - Here's a response to a reader that might be of use.
PS - Here's a response to a reader that might be of use.
3 comments:
Hi Subir ,
Just to add - the graded classroom was also a product of the industrial revolution with assembly line production where atomising holistic work was seen as more efficient . An American education supervisor visiting Germany was impressed with this and took it back to the States with him. Your timing is about right. Multiagency group self paced learning situations are definitely qualitatively better than mono grade systems and instead of capitalising on the phenomena of small schools as they exist in India today and using them to our advantage - we think it's a disadvantage. The problem is not with the multiagegroup multi grade class situation but the technology of class wise textbooks and curriculum which constrain the teacher. Can we develop a movement for more flexible learning systems?
Totally agree! And have always the feel that why all thechildren must learn something and a same things in a time bound... !
This series on the myths of ineffective education systems is enlightening. Myth #2 underscores the importance of addressing curriculum relevance and student engagement for meaningful learning. Looking forward to debunking more myths!
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