A couple of years ago, after a highly successful and deeply satisfying summer camp with school children in Dalhousie, I wrote a blog titled 'working with clay'. Having spent the last 9 months in Education in India, I feel the metaphor of children being clay might have been a bit misguided and erroneous.
The notion of a teacher as this all important agent who moulds destinies is misplaced. A human brain is not an empty jug in which you fill knowledge, nor is it an amorphous entity to which you give form.
The idea of a seed comes close to describing a human brain at birth. It carries its code inside - whether it'll be an oak or a grass. A teacher can give it the nutrition or environment to make it the best oak or the best grass it can be. But it is tough for a teacher to turn an oak into grass - if at all she is successful, it will be a very gnarled piece of grass!
This understanding has led me to redefine the role of education. Every child is unique, like a seed that carries its future within. The role of education is to enable the fruition of this potential, not guide a child to the norm of an 'ideal child'.
Now if every child is unique, how can an assembly line methodology work? How will one way of teaching work for everyone? Shouldn't education cater to the unique learning style of each student?
This is not a trivial challenge because school education is driven by syllabus targets and high teacher-student ratio. The focus is on finishing the prescribed teaching modules, testing it by rote based exams and moving the batch forward, to make way for the next one.
We can definitely do better. Technology can play a role. Teacher training will definitely play a role. But most important is to educate parents. To give them the knowledge that their child is unique and they are doing a disservice to her uniqueness if they benchmark her growth by uni-dimensional exam scores.
Over the next few posts, I'll share my experiences of developing an education pedagogy that caters to the needs of the learner, not of the teacher or administrator.
