NEED TO IMPROVE CURRENT EDUCATION SYSTEM

We need to stop thinking of public education as an "educational system" rather than, say, a learning process. With an "educational system" we have tremendous systemic costs associated with things that have little or nothing to do with learning.

The entire education is highly politicized with major factions (politicians, unions, school administrators, teachers and general public) having different major goals, and ensuring that kids get a practical education is not high on the agenda and not easily measured.  The government want control of the education process even though they clearly lack technical know how , experience to justify their existence and attain power for the sake of power over millions of people with no moral regard. The existing teachers' goal is to avoid learning anything new, since they will not be receiving higher salaries for doing so. Society's more elite classes; doctors, lawyers, professors, etc. goal is to minimize the amount of competition their children face from other kids during their education and therefore they indulge in admissions with special quotas and donations in prestigious institution. The masses' goal is to be ignorant and to go party, socialize with friends, go vacation, play with kids, vegetate in front of the TV box daily.

It is high time that people should raise their voices against the faults and malpractices in education system.

  

Here are some measures that needs to be adopted for improving the Education system:

• More interaction and less lecturing

The problem with today's education system is that students feel lectures are insipid and they are not motivating enough to make them read further, which i think should be the primary aim of any lecture. We need more conversations rather than monologues to inspire kids into the habit of learning.

• Students can learn according to their own pace

Today's classroom places every student at the same level by demanding students to understand the lecture as soon as it is delivered.  But like any distribution, IQ also follows a bell curve. There are slow learners, fast learners and average students. The current model is very inefficient especially when a student fails to understand a very basic concept at the beginning of the lecture, and the whole of the remaining lecture is based on that concept. In flipped teaching model, every student gets ample time at home to understand the contents before the class. Also since the only job of the tutor is to engage the students, he/she will have more time in clearing the doubts of the students. The tutor also can give differential and special treatment to the outliers. 

• Fosters creativity

The present educational system hampers the creativity of the students by exposing the students to the contents of the lecture and ideas of the other students without giving them any time to think about the topic. Psychology has shown that this produces a bunch of conformists and less number of innovative ideas; the same reason why brainstorming has been proved to be ineffective.

• Introverted students are given their space

Most of today's classroom learning revolves on group activities, which restricts the space the introverts need to grow as an individual. Flipped model gives introverts the much needed space to go berserk with their ideation and thoughts.

In all, the system should not be the one that leaves the student in the cave of dark passages, nor should it be the one which points him to a certain passage based on his marks, but it should be the one that lights up all the passages and tells him which one would lead to where while making him responsible enough to choose the best passage that would lead him to his destination.

-Bhavya Bhatia

Final year student at JMC, Delhi University.