When i was in school 3 decades ago, career choices were limited to Engineering, Medicine, Law, IAS and Accounting. Rarely the choice of what career the child wanted was made by the child as there was very little awareness of what was good or bad. It was almost always the choice of the parents based on what they considered to be  safe and secure career options. Being able to get into a position to “provide”  was the most important criterion. Most parents considered themselves failures if the child did not become a doctor or an engineer or an IAS officer.  In many parts of India, dowry tags of the eligible bachelors were directly proportional to the premium-ness of the education qualification !

Today, the child growing up in urban india , is a “google” generation kid, who some marketers call as the Millenials. They are the technology generation kids born with a PC/Internet/ Mobile. Technology and devices are part of their childhood . They take to technology like a fish takes to water. Anything that’s not digital makes less sense to them.

I believe that what the Personal Computer did to the US/ Developed countries, the mobile has the potential to do in India and most developing countries. Coupled with a very robust TV penetration, the awareness level of this generation is far superior to the earlier generations. Add a reasonably  growing Indian economy, job creation across many sectors, demographic quotient favoring the youth in India and an ageing population in most developed markets, the future prospects from a job  point of view are looking very attractive.

If the earlier generation was about job security and safety this generation is fast moving to “this-is-what-I-love-doing”.  This is triggering  endless career choices, and these career choices are being debated between an arguably better informed child and his less informed parents/teachers. Are the schools , administrators, curriculum , teachers poised to handle this significant shift ?   Also, most education companies have not embraced this in the technology frameworks that they have put together in schools .

Popularity: 10% [?]

Literacy has been one of the fundamental goals of education in this country. Children should be able to  read and write not only because it would help them find jobs, but also because it opens up a whole new world, the world that resides in print; the world that is capable of giving pleasure of a kind different from others.

Literacy should ideally include reading the written word, comprehending it and responding to it. However, the concept has now been limited to reading and writing the alphabet and the ability to write a signature.

In the article Reading is basic to democracy , Krishna Kumar lays the blame, squarely on the education system, more so, the primary education system. What the article does is to redefine literacy to encompass comprehension and response as well as to acknowledge its political significance in a democracy.

The article makes for interesting reading, at the least. I think, the writer hits the nail on the head with most of his observations. Yes, we need literacy to mean more than just deciphering letters. Yes, we need literacy to be taught, and taught well at the primary school level during the most efficient learning period; during the formative years. Yes, we need to develop a culture of reading in our children. However, the author also dwells on a point that most of us wouldn’t have thought of- the sociology or relevance of a particular text to a child. This is where he takes us by surprise and urges us to reconsider the texts we give our tiny tots to read. What do you think?

Popularity: 9% [?]

Every Maharashtrian village is traditionally structured along caste lines. With

the higher castes residing at the centre, near the resources, vis-a-vis the common well, the schools, the health care centers and the lower castes at the periphery. In the Konkan, the Katkari Adivasis are the casteless ones, and consequently, they reside furthest from the village centre, on the hills that make up the Western Ghats, far away from development. Geographically marginalized and socially discriminated against, the Adivasis are also politically excluded making them some of the most impoverished people in the country.

While working with Sarvahara Jana Andolan (SJA), a people’s organization of the Katkari Adivasis of western Maharashtra, I attended what was called the Activists School. This four day residential programme was conducted once every month for activists of both SJA and other organisations. It aimed at educating people and making them conscious of different realities with the mandate of generating action for social transformation. But most importantly, activists undergo a gradual realization of how much control they have over their own, their community’s, their country’s and the world’s destinies, slowly obliterating the fatalism that was so characteristic of feudalism. At the same time, they are infused with a newfound self-respect and self-confidence that the caste system had completely eroded. In four days, we learnt psychology, economics, civics, how to file an FIR (this was part of the ‘curriculum’ because it had currency and relevance for the target audience) and every night we sang and danced to indigenous tunes. Much of my fellow learners had barely passed the third standard. This was perhaps the most educative experience of my life.

The idea isn’t novel, really. The great Brazilian educator and pedagogue, Paulo Freire, spoke of educating for critical consciousness (and the Activist School is inspired from his writings).As far as my limited reading of Freire goes, the most significant aspects of conscientization are as follows.

1. To develop critical consciousness of the world and different realities
2. To use this critical consciousness to perform transformative action in order to liberate oneself from oppression (oppression can be of any kind, class based, caste based, urban-rural type, gender based, employer-employee type etc.)
3. To use critical consciousness and transformative action to create a new situation which is conducive to the pursuit of a fuller humanity

As a knowledge system, this is a deeply thought-out, radical philosophy based on critical theory. Moreover, it is also a difficult concept to grasp especially for those with a mainstream education (for the newly initiated it nullifies mainstream education- so the theory becomes personal as it threatens status quo)

But, let us just take the three objectives at face value. They are, none of them, antithetical to education as we, in the mainstream would perceive it. We do want our education system to develop in our children the ability to think and react critically. We do want it to help them liberate themselves from social, political and economic shackles.

Pedagogy of theoppressed

Infact, Freire in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, briefly argues how the ‘oppressor’ is also leading a sub-human life. So this is not a ‘special’ kind of education for the poor and the marginalized. And finally, how truly rewarding to create a new situation to pursue one’s humanity unfettered?

Sounds like a lot of rhetoric?  Which is why the Activist School, in many ways, drives the point home. The idea, then, is to see if the Activist School can be extrapolated to the education of children and other groups. I believe it can.

Popularity: 13% [?]

That seems to be attitude of parents today – teach the kid everything under the sun before their ages reach double digits ! Something I saw today and read yesterday triggered off this line of thought. A young 10 year old buy zooming past near Banerghatta Road at 9am on his old Kinetic Honda to drop off this 7-8 year old sister at school. And a 5 year old taking photographs with his mother’s camera phone and uploading them onto her facebook page !

Parents tread a fine line in their desire to expose their kids to a variety of things. My 6 year old boy knows more about space, dinosaurs, refrigerator features(thanks to tv ads) , cricket, tennis, the list is long…than his hapless mother. The balance a responsible parent needs to bring in is in filtering out the scum and letting the child absorb only that which will help enrich his mind.

I think here is where ParentEdge – the parenting magazine which Prayag is nourishing – will help – it will arm parents with that added edge to “catch em young”, yet leave them unspoilt and pure.

Like us on our facebook page to know more……

Popularity: 10% [?]

I was recently reading about how, with the increasing digitization, budget-cuts and consequent need for innovation, libraries too are changing from the traditional book-filled institutions to a ‘drive-in, express’ book borrowing outlet.  For example, in a suburb of St Paul, Mn,  “the new library branch has no librarians, no card catalogue and no comfortable chairs in which to curl up and read. Instead, the Library Express is a stack of metal lockers outside city hall. When patrons want a book or DVD, they order it online and pick it up from a digitally locked, glove-compartment- sized cubby a few days later. It’s a library as conceived by the Amazon.com generation.”

As with all innovation, there are mixed feelings about this new trend.  On one hand, if this makes it easier for the younger generation to get into/keep up the reading habit, then so be it.  At the same time, I think they are missing out on the benefits of a physical structure filled with books and with fellow readers, with meeting of minds with similar tastes in books and with a love of reading.  But that’s the bibliophile in me talking!  A fellow-spirit, James Lund (a library director), has said, “The basis of the vending machine is to reduce the library to a public-book locker. Our real mission is public education and public education can’t be done from a vending machine. It takes educators, it takes people, it takes interaction.”

Hopefully, the older physical libraries will co-exist with the newer ‘vending’ libraries, catering to the needs of all kinds of readers.  What do you think?

Read more at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304354104575568592236241242.html

Popularity: 8% [?]

Ever since Prayag’s foray into the education segment, I have kept my eyes and ears open for interesting articles on how children learn ( additionally I am interested in these as a mother of two school going kids) and how different systems across the world impart learning to children. Two articles I read recently caught my attention. One was an article in New York Times that debunked a lot of currently held beliefs and among other things suggested that assessments were a good way to check learning effectiveness. Close on the heels of this article I came across an interesting article written by an American lady who had raised her kids in China. The article started with how the focus on tests and memorizing started very early and was sometimes hard on the kids. She also contrasted the Asian parents’ attitude of wanting more assessments with that of westerners who felt their kids were being subjected to too much. Interestingly the article goes on to talk about how her kids, now in their late teens have nothing but fond memories of their schooling in China as they never looked at assessments as assessments. Also, her son who was put through the “flash card treatment” before he was reading- ready, became the most voracious reader in their family. The article then talks about the current thinking in the US about wanting to reinstate some level of assessments into the system.

So, then, coming now to our own Indian system- today there is a lot of debate on whether our Indian system lays too much emphasis on tests and exams; we want to move from marks to grades, we don’t want exams till class 5, and so on. I meet a lot of young parents who want their kids to study in a way that is “different” from the way they studied etc etc.

I am beginning to wonder whether we are unwittingly throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Should we not preserve what is good about our system while emulating the many good ideas from the west, like holistic learning, emphasis on doing and projects etc.

It would be great to have a debate as I am sure everyone who reads this will have a point of view on this. Over to you………..

Popularity: 11% [?]