System shifts to work for

Unending Education

1) Most adults invest in their education when it is of immediate need or clearly guarantees returns on invested time. Keeping time aside for growth, learning and teaching is not considered important.

Shift: Work towards a culture where people put aside time to continuously evolve themselves and support others growth.

Education

2) The goal of schools across the country is oriented towards clerical jobs and each stage in the educational ladder only helps in getting to the next one. This makes the focus of learning as simple procedural learning or rote learning requiring no application in the fundamental grades (5th to 8th).

Shift: Work to transform a school as a space that retains the spirit of learning that we are born with. Schools needs to encourage methods for children to apply their knowledge and engage more actively in their learning. This also moves towards a culture of unending learning as you learn to grow.

3) The only motivation that teachers provide is examinations that only test procedural learning. Another result of short duration examinations is that they do not assess the ability to plan, research, analyze, meta-cognition, patient problem solving and ability to work in groups; all essential qualities that need to be developed in children. The age where children can develop their ability to handle complexity is replaced by replication and simplistic procedural thinking.

Shift: Explore alternatives to examinations by allowing students to express what they have learnt through expression and creation of projects both physical and virtual (programming)

Society

4) The youth getting out of such an this education system have low employability. Anyone who finds an employment gets busy making a living and is in no position to question the education system. The most skilled people in our society are not actively involved in education. The situation is even more stark in the village schools in India and most skilled local people migrate to the cities.

Shift: Provide rural youth an opportunity to learn their choice of specialization  while getting a taste of what they can accomplish in education. As they become better skilled their impact on children will also grow.

5) Businesses lament that finding ‘good people’ is difficult, but little is done to fix the problem at the root – in the delivery of education at the primary and middle school level.

Shift: Make education an essential part of what we do every day.

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