I came across this interesting video presentation talk by
Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award. In the video he talks about what’s wrong with public education and why paradigm change is required. While the talk and the statistics are primarily USA centric, I think the state of affairs and the arguments he states are quite valid even in India, and perhaps most of the world.
I feel that divergent thinking, while reduces as we grow up and get "educated", can increases as we start working & gather many more experiences. Many organizations (at least in the services sector in India) now are focused on teaching (training) their workforce on divergent thinking. And with the increasing exposure to television, movies, the Internet, our thought goes beyond what we might experience directly.
Of course, there is no questioning that the school system should allow children to learn the way they want & what they want. There is definitely a need to reform the education system. However, as parents I feel we can do our bit of giving freedom to children even while following the set system of school education. That is something that is in our control and easily implementable while we continue to push for reforms in the school system.
My 10 year old son wrote a creative writing piece as part of his home work that I just had to post here. It has some interesting insights into the lessons of life he might be imbibing at this age. So here it is with due permissions from my son to post it on my blog (with corrected spellings).
A day in the life of a student
As everyone knows that student life is difficult, I would first plan my day so that I don’t have to plan it afterwards. I would go to school, do my homework. But it isn’t as easy as it looks like. Some ma’ams (teachers) give hectic homework which makes my brain heavy as a kilo, and some ma’ams are so sweet that I get overconfident for the UT (Unit Test) she has made and I get bad marks. Some are both so I get confused is she strict or sweet.
There are always two choices, a bad side or a good side. The bad side is full of cool guys and bullies while the good side is full of kids who only study! Half of the bad side becomes prefects and a quarter of the good side become prefects. This student life is so confusing.
So a day in the life of a student if hectic, difficult, confusing and weird.
My soon-to-be-10-year-old son has been introduced to various ages of history thanks to a popular computer game. Out of curiosity, I asked him what ‘age’ we are currently in. According to him, we are currently in the “Touch age”. He is inspired by the iPhone and other touch screen phones he is exposed to. The next age according to him will be the “Talk age”. We will just need to talk to the machines and they will act on what we say. After that we will have the “Think age”. We will only need to think what we want, and machines will interpret our thoughts and act accordingly.
So there you are, that’s how children see the future. We have our work cut out for us.
