in Redefining Education

Redefining Education: 1

image

This is a new series of blogpost. The entire endeavour here is to invest some of our precious time in discussing something that has always been an integral part of our modern existence: Education.

This is never intended to be any sort of prescription by any stretch of imagination. Rather I expect it to be a series of provocations, ones that might resonate and provoke further conversation. I am highly indebted to Sir Ken Robinson and Seth Godin for influencing my thoughts.

The entire set up of post industrial revolution education system was primarily created to fulfil the burgeoning needs of skilled workforce. It wasn’t until 1918 that compulsory education could become an inseparable part of the world society.

And one of the major rationale used to sell this watershed transformation to industrialists was the idea that educated kids coming out of schools would eventually prove to be more compliant and productive workers.

Do you really think that our current system of segregating kids into batches based upon the criteria of date of birth (something very similar to the date of manufacture) and teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions is a mere coincidence — it was a major investment in our economic future.

Large-scale education was never developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the existing system. Scale was always going to be more important than quality.

And for the past three successive generations it has worked like magic, successful in producing generations of productive, fully employed workers.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, the employer will always find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out students who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do we see the disconnect here? Because every year, we are more than happy to churn out millions of workers who are trained to do whatever they are being told.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Write a Comment

Comment

  1. Well said…nice blog.kuch to change aana chahiye apne education system me…jisse ki kids interest le padne me.

    • Very true Arun…its high time we do something to realign the entire ecosystem of education to make it more relevant to the present Information Age.

  2. Good Piyush the way u compared the present education system with large scale production system. And this system is designed to obtain the result what we want. It is adequately achieved by applying proper pressure on each of them. But if v instead of applying pressure project them to different guide ways, then according to their shapes n condition they will mould into different n unique objects.
    Hence present learners should also be guided according to their unique abilities instead of pressures.

    • That’s right Divyakant…the post Information Age Education should focus more on honing the innate abilities of every kid. Because in the present system, individual passion becomes the most common causality due to fear and conformity. There’s absolute no room for someone who wants to learn faster, or someone who wants to purse something else, or someone who cares about a particular issue. Diversity is discouraged at every step of the way.

  3. I see you don’t monetize your blog, i’v got idea how to earn some additional money using one simple method, just
    search in google for: money making ideas by Loocijano