Opinion
‘Making India a global education powerhouse’ – Key educators at SGEF2018 share with us the steps – Part I
The theme of the second ScooNews Global Educators Fest – ‘Making India a global education powerhouse’ – might seem a tad insurmountable to some. However, many educators have implemented a range of measures that have put the mission firmly on track. Key educators at SGEF 2018 share with us the steps
From blending the technological revolution with the traditional Indian way of learning, to making the shift from content-centric to research centric teaching, real examples of making India a global education powerhouse
The theme of the second ScooNews Global Educators Fest – ‘Making India a global education powerhouse’ – might seem a tad insurmountable to some. However, many educators have implemented a range of measures that have put the mission firmly on track. Key educators at SGEF 2018 share with us the steps they have already adopted to reach that target. Read on for inspiration.
Connection and collaboration
Dr. Jagpreet Singh
Headmaster, The Punjab Public School, Nabha
A lot of people have a very wrong idea that “global” means going out of your school into another country. It’s not true. Any school can be a global school sitting in a classroom. They only need to connect – connect to another part of the world, learn their culture, integrate with them and there has to be a lot of collaborative learning which can give them an idea of the values that other countries have.
We have a lot of international exchange programmes, we have a lot of children from other countries who come and stay with us. We are also a member of the AFS. These give us an opportunity to host these children and see their culture and understand them. Education doesn’t have boundaries today. We have to talk about global values. In that manner, we have to conduct our classrooms. Our school is a very rooted school but the values given to the children are global. Sustainability is a concern. We are giving them a global touch, exposure to the global challenges which will come tomorrow, and the skills needed. The digital world has made it so easy to integrate with the global culture. India or America, they are part of the same colony. If you go to America, France or Italy, you will find that they are all talking on the same subjects. The issues are common but the approach to the issue may be different. I think India is already a powerhouse – we just need to give a global touch to it. The 21st century is our century and we will make an academic difference and we will prevail in the world. This is my very strong conviction.
Setting standards
Kavita Anand
Co-Founder, Adhyayan Quality Education Foundation
We need to check what people know first and what are the skills they need to have to make that happen and what is the right attitude that they need to have. All these need to be available for people to pick up. In the work that we are doing, we ensure that everybody knows what “good” looks like. As a school, you must assess yourself and know where you are. If you want to be a global powerhouse, then first get to know what schools that are powerhouses are doing and where are you in relation to that. And then we start their journey and hand hold them for as long as they like. That's what we do. ‘We’ means all the people who have got onto this journey. So, any school which says, ‘Yes, we want to be a part,’ they become part of ‘we’. So, you have an expanding group now of 400 schools that is working on private schools – working towards this with other schools. It’s a movement and it is not controlled by me.
The problem is we all think we have reached there, like we have reached ‘platinum status’. That is the general feeling that most schools have about themselves because they have not been given a standard to look at. This country has no set standard. In the UK, you have Ofsted, in Dubai you have KHDA (Knowledge and Human Development Authority) which is really difficult. In Dubai, if you do not match the government's requirement for a good school, you can be closed down. You are given two years and if you don't get there, you will be closed down. It's that tough in most places to run a school. Here, you don't even need a background in education to run a school. So that is why we are in the situation we are in right now. Also, all our schools are not run by the government, whereas in most countries, there’s total government control over schools. All private players are in, there are low cost schools, high cost schools, so there's a massive variety. Although now for the first time, government schools have a standard called Shaala Siddhi which is brought out. Now, 4.5 lakh schools have assessed themselves.
Linking play with Concept
Lata Vaidyanathan
Veteran educationist & former principal, Modern School, Delhi
After my tenure with Modern school, Dr Pachauri had asked me to set up Teri Prakriti school, which is the first green school in the country. For shortage of funds the school had to close down this March. Along with the entire team, I joined this new school which has come up in a village called Bandhwari, where we are setting up this new school. Both the schools gave me an opportunity to look at something fresh because I believe that if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. So, you’ve to change things. In my wanting to change things, first of all, I tweaked a lot of sustainable studies along with teacher training and teacher planning. We changed and brought in the value system of sustainable practices in each lesson, wherever possible, so that when it is delivered, it is linked like a new subject.
In each of my classes, I have an experiment going on to find how to link play with the concept in question. For example, we do subtraction with Poppins candy and whatever they take, they can eat and they can learn to count how many are left!
What are we doing to make India a global hub? In our school, we are drawing from the 5,000-year old civilisation to see how we can make an Indianised early childhood curriculum. Now, after the industrial age, we have moved on to the knowledge society and we have come into constructivism and that too we look to Vygotsky for it, whereas in the guru-shiksha parampara, everybody had to construct their own knowledge. For example, they call it the headstart, early morning 40 minutes, we call it the ‘shubh vela’. It has a chithan vela, a prakritik vela, a kadha vela, a pustak yog vela. Even when we do stories, we are trying to draw from our scriptures. If I say “Mary and John”, it is alien to the child whereas if I say “Sangeeta and Lata”, they immediately relate. Why aren’t we marketing our story books better? Thankfully, Katha and Pratham are releasing many books which are good and available for less than Rs 100. The foreign stories are culturally so different, even the clothes that they wear, the way they look. I’m not against it, but we should look at how to use the volumes and volumes of treasure contained in our own culture, which will be easy for them to understand. Once we know how to learn from the khazana we have, learning somebody else's khazana will be a cakewalk. That is my current effort. People move from concrete to abstract. I’m looking at how to concretise the abstract. Learning is always beautiful. There is no discovery in learning, there is only empowerment in learning. There is only refinement in learning, there is only redoing in learning. I’m not teaching you how to float, I’m only teaching what makes it float. I think somewhere deep in my mind I have the power, the patience and also the humility to believe that I have it all here in this country.
I wish I could not follow a board but there would hardly be any takers for it and how do you sustain systems without money? So, I do not have the energy to build a school, I can only run a school.
Preparing for life
Meera Isaacs
Principal, Cathedral School, Mumbai
Any school worth its name is well-aware of what is happening everywhere. We no longer live in ‘India’ per se. We live in a global world and whether we like it or not, whether a school is progressive or not, children are being inundated with technology from all over the world. It’s no longer an isolated thing. It just happens. We might as well enhance the learning situation for them and that's exactly what we are doing. We are trying to get the kids to slowly talk about collaboration, enquiry-based methods, project-based methods. It bothers me that there is so much going in the world and we are going back to some prehistoric time. We have done away with exams and I don’t give honours and prizes below a class/ age because then the parents jump on their children. The competition is so high. We should be teaching our children values as teachers. You fail, it's okay. It’s a new opportunity to learn. We are preparing our children for life, finally. I tell the parents that we build a foundation from here. Let us work in collaboration, school and parents. We are human beings, first and foremost. I tell them “So what if your child did not get into Harvard, he got in somewhere else, right? Make him a good human being, first.”
We have a consumer-oriented society and parents have a lot of money. They lose sense of what they really want.
You should just let children be. You will get very interesting insights from them. An untouched mind takes in a lot of stimuli and then we kill it all with conformity. If we don’t change with the world, we will be left behind. There are a lot of opportunities available for children. We have to keep pace with the world but I also strongly believe that we should not forget our roots. I tell my students that good manners never go out of fashion. Wishing a teacher is a mark of respect. You have to talk to people with respect. You may be a topper in class but you need to learn to behave yourself and show respect to another person. It’s about being a human being, more than anything else. Bright children will get their degrees but these things are more important. We are such a marks-driven country and that should change.