“The education needs to start with the child. Not with the prescribed content.”
“Everybody is trying to perfect the system and make a good bet about the knowledge and skills that our children might need. All of this says that the measures we use to measure education outcomes, as the best education systems in terms of test scores, do not result in the same kinds of things we might value otherwise — entrepreneurial capabilities, confidence, enjoyment."
These findings have led to question the value of the tests altogether. If the stated goal is to get kids ready for careers, and careers demand confidence, creativity, and an entrepreneurial attitude, then why focus on test scores that seem to produce the opposite effect?
Some reading programs could improve your students’ reading scores, but cause your students to hate education. Most education systems start out by defining the outcomes. They make a bet about which skills will be important and promise that if students master those skills, they will succeed. This as a flawed approach because it forces everyone into a homogeneous group, a bit like making sausage out of all different kinds of meat. Defining outcomes allows systems to measure results, but it stamps out individuality.
Everybody is reminded every day that they have to master the skills; But in the process you have people who are either kicked out of the system or put down into a different school and they will lose confidence. By valuing what’s prescribed and assessed, the system creates a uniform group with little confidence in the individual’s unique contributions. At times teachers have been asked to improve our schools, to make our schools more effective, but the question I’m raising is, --effective at what?
Now the case from Bihar is being telecasted again and again showing how the Bihar topper students lacks in basics even after scoring 99% in Board Examinations. But let me ask the Media, though they have done a good job exposing the current education systems corruption. But these students are the victims of this corrupt system. The question is not How they got 99% ; The question is who made them to go through this.
Let’s catch hold of those educational institutions and the irresponsible teachers, who for the sake of turning education into money mending business, have let down our children to this stage. Instead of highlighting the victims; it’s important to reach out the culprits, that is the institutions, the schools, and colleges and also the teachers.
This is not just the case in Bihar. It’s happening all over the country. Government has made the laws But are those Laws monitored by any organization?
Come to Kallaburagi (Gulbarga), Karnataka; here you find 4 to 5 Schools on every area of the city. Here most of the schools do not comply for the basic necessities of the students studying there. With more than 1500 students in a school, there are no sports accessories present ( two footballs, 4 badminton rackets with one cock) and nothing else to play. No interschool competitions for the students ( the schools are as old as 10 to 15 yrs), no extra curricular activities, no labs, throughout the year, some subjects have no teachers at all.
You may not believe even for recent 10th Board exam, two or three subjects were taught one month before the examinations. This is how the schools are running. Who should be blamed and whom to complain.
Please come forward to bring this issue on national platform, so that our children will not face the humiliation of ignorance. Let there be a proper personality-oriented curriculum to be followed. The problem is how many institutions allow their teachers to come forward with child-growth solutions? How many teachers are allowed to teach freely as per the requirement of the students? Some of the teachers are just appointed by the schools and colleges to spread Terror over the students; in the name of discipline.
We start with individual differences; we start with their cultural strengths. Beginning with the individual and building upwards from there allows each person to become uniquely great at something. And when students are passionate about anything, they can then be creative and entrepreneurial.
Students who have grown up in the current school system are used to being told exactly what they need to do in order to succeed. But the emphasis on grades and college can sometimes have the unintended consequence of making learning all about achieving an external goal and not about the learning itself.
Sometimes the teaching and studying strategies thought to work best actively contradict brain-based learning.
The dominant teaching style is incompatible, because the traditional way of learning by teaching the students about how their brains work.
-----------------------JAWERIA AFREEN HUSSAINI.