Redefining education
Make it creative, encourage
risk-taking and expand the idea of success
During his
recent India visit, Google
CEO Sundar Pichai
spoke of how India’s education system would do well to emphasise greater
creativity and risk-taking. We ought to listen.
There is
perhaps no other country in the world that glorifies examination results and
starting salaries the way we do. In most cultures it’s a bit rude to talk about
these things even in private. But in India, it’s the stuff of front-page,
prime-time news. Buses and outdoor hoardings are plastered with images of top
rankers who have “cracked” significant exams and “aced” standardised tests. We
put starting salaries and entrance exams on a pedestal and force a singular
definition of success down our collective throats. Is the purpose of education
really to max standardised tests and rake in the cash?
Most Indian
parents today, themselves products of a top-down, instructional model of
education, replete with corporal punishment, mindless cramming, and
regurgitation of facts, would agree with Ken Robinson, that such a system,
devised during the Industrial Revolution, is ill-suited to the needs of modern
society. At the same time, there is huge anxiety among parents, teachers and
children in India today about a society where 99-per cent cutoffs are the new
normal for college admissions. Multiple voices compete inside the heads of everyone
involved. Shouldn’t education be about a holistic exposure to all facets of
life rather than a cracking of tests? Shouldn’t education be a force for peace,
a means to overcoming prejudice? But the material world doesn’t reward these
qualities! Yes, I want my kids to be creative and curious but didn’t the work
ethic and analytical abilities drilled into us by old-fashioned Indian public
schools make us a generation of high-achievers? Will new-age approaches to
education turn my kids into under-achievers?
Multiple
studies have shown that personality attributes such as grit, curiosity, and
self-control are stronger predictors of achievement than IQ. Writer Paul Tough
in his book, How Children Succeed, challenged what he called “the cognitive
hypothesis” or the belief “that success today depends primarily on cognitive
skills — the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the
abilities to recognise letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns”.
Instead, Tough offered a character-hypothesis or the idea that non-cognitive
skills, like persistence, curiosity, conscientiousness, optimism, and
self-control, are more crucial than raw brainpower to achieving success. Tough
believes that character is created by encountering and overcoming failure. A
culture that allows children to explore, take academic risks and learn from
failure is a culture that creates curious, passionate, confident, and
empathetic adults. As Einstein famously noted, “Imagination is more important
than knowledge”.
An education
system that values creativity is one that makes a deliberate effort to spark
thoughtfulness and independent thinking, teaches students how to learn, instils
a lifelong love of learning, pushes students to find their own interpretations,
and guides the development of a strong moral compass. Creativity in education
has to do with a constructivist approach to education, where learning is an
active, contextualised process of knowledge construction that builds on prior
knowledge, social interaction and authentic tasks, rather than the passive
receiving of information.
By
glorifying starting salaries and standardised tests in India, we also propagate
a singular definition of intelligence that skews our incentives and priorities
in unhealthy ways. This creates, for example, a society where blind obeisance
to corporate imperatives is valued far more than, say, the pursuit of teaching
or the arts. To be fair, this is a flaw intrinsic to capitalism but one that is
at least recognised and partially redressed via generous subsidies and grants
in the developed world. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner introduced the
theory of multiple intelligences in 1983, and posited that IQ was an inadequate
measure of human ability. Beyond the linguistic and logical-mathematical skills
that IQ tests entail, Gardner proposed musical intelligence, spatial
intelligence, bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence,
intrapersonal intelligence and naturalist intelligence as key expressions of
human ability that find relevance in a wide variety of professions. Gardner’s
research expanded the idea of intelligence. We could do with such an expansion
in India.
A society
that values multiple intelligences, encourages exploration, accepts failure,
prizes environmental conscientiousness, and allows people to define success on
their terms may be what Pichai had in mind. For India’s over-populated,
hyper-competitive context, such a reality may still be a while away. But it’s a
goal that’s well worth aiming for.
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Librarian
Khaitan & Co
No comments:
Post a Comment