One of the most remarkable features of British rule in India has been the fact that the greatest injuries done to the people of India have taken the form of blessings. Of this, Education is a striking example; for no more crushing blows have ever been struck at the roots of Indian National evolution than those which have been struck, often with other, and the best intentions, in the name of Education….”

Ananda Coomaraswamy

http://copypastenation.blogspot.com/2006/07/of-all-indian-problems-educational-is.html

All over India, there is a vague feeling of discontent in the air about our prevalent system of education.

The mind of our educated community has been brought up within the enclosure of the modern Indian educational system. It has grown as familiar to us as our own physical body, unconsciously giving rise in our mind to the belief that it can never be changed. Our imagination dare not soar beyond its limits; we are unable to see it and judge it from outside. We neither have the courage nor the heart to say that it has to be replaced by something else….

They [Indian students] never have intellectual courage, because they never see the process and the environment of those thoughts which they are compelled to learn ¾ and thus they lose the historical sense of all ideas, never knowing the perspective of their growth…. They not only borrow a foreign culture, but also a foreign standard of judgement; and thus, not only is the money not theirs, but not even the pocket. Their education is a chariot that does not carry them in it, but drags them behind it. The sight is pitiful and very often comic.

The education which we receive from our universities takes it for granted that it is for cultivating a hopeless desert, and that not only the mental outlook and the knowledge, but also the whole language must bodily be imported from across the sea. And this makes our education so nebulously distant and unreal, so detached from all our associations of life, so terribly costly to us in time, health and means, and yet so meagre of results. — Rabindranath Tagore

http://copypastenation.blogspot.com/2006/07/it-has-been-wholly-ignored-that-we.html

http://copypastenation.blogspot.com/2006/07/beginning-of-irretrievable-degradation.html

however, there are certain bits where i don’t fully agree in your post:

[quote]
Education is all about loading the bootstrap program in the brain of a child. … The important point is that the bootstrap program has to be loaded first and it has to be very small and very efficient. I think that there is sufficient evidence around that the bootstrap program is very small. One only needs to know how to read and write (at least in one language), do a bit of arithmetic, and understand a bit of rudimentary logic.
[/quote]

i am not sure only “rudimentary logic” would suffice. agreed, that one does not need heaps of math, science, history and geography. i also agree, that basic set of instructions are simple, within the first seven years of schooling, most would be on their own…

in pyramid of understanding, first steps are, of course, pure information itself. to know history and geography is important, especially in today’s world which is so well connected, and global issues have local effects and vice versa. one has to know how to analyse large amount of information, and how to retrieve important pieces for one’s own use. therefore, a student has to understand how to “discriminate” between poor information and “good enough” information.

apart from simple logic, what one student needs to know, is how to analyse concepts, split a given large concept in multiple smaller parts and work with smaller concepts independent of the bigger concept (from where one started), and how to use those smaller concepts along with other concepts to create something new. of course, grading is to ensure that this concept of “dealing with concepts” is learnt properly. some may lag behind others, in which case, there is only a little more time given to that child.

more later, perhaps in an email.

– ashish

Two issues not touched upon are: (a) content creation, and (b) scale of content dissemination. Technology can be a prop for these. While I agree with the excessive ‘patch work’ that our education system has had, to push the pills analogy further, we need a pharma industry to (a) create the right pill, and (b) distribute it on a large scale. Although raising money is a prerequisite, a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests (possibly erroneous on my part – my assumptions may be plain wrong) that it is not as formidable a task as creation and distributions are. Distribution, for instance, involves training a sufficient number of teachers, attracting them to the profession, and retaining them – apart from the usual resources like classrooms, black boards and chalks etc.

Your approach seems to attempt bypassing the teacher as early as possible (a student is given access to information and a free hand at learning). The success of this strategy relative to the one that has teachers can be gauged in terms of the number, and variety, of productive individuals that each strategy creates. I have no information to weigh these two against each other. Perhaps we need to actually experiment. Moreover your approach is novel while the use of a teacher is time honoured, and while that basis is ill founded, it is very likely to be used in practice to argue against your idea. The role of a true and honest teacher is to speed up learning by actually showing how ideas to pitch up against each other and then that subtle part of the whats and the hows of basis to be used to select the “best”.

Criticisms in previous comments – about homework etc, in my opinion are second-order details. The issue is here is much bigger – the underlying mental models on which the

education system is based.

In my mind, all problems with education are borne out of a single fallacy – the red pill, so to speak – and that is the systemic underestimating, and misunderstanding, of the very

nature of what a human being is.

An obvious metaphor for the old model would be Human beings as deterministic machine systems, with finite inputs needed for finite output. Like automobiles, upon being filled

with fuel (information etc), they perform according to the quality & quantity of fuel provided, as well as the quality of the parts that they were made with.

Like efficient cars, at best, this system yields efficient human beings – extremely employable in existing companies & industries . Nations of clerks, colonizable subjects,

managers and technicians. The kind of prodigious success that DOESN’T involve ‘getting a great job’ is achieved by resilient souls who never bought into the system in the first

place, or managed in spite of it.

We now know that human beings, specifically their brains – are not pre-designed machines, but complex adaptive systems. This is an emergent quality at every scale – from

individual, to groups, to Cities… (thanks Atanu – my architecture thesis was an exercize in futility trying to leverage this).

All such a system need is rules, not instructions. The prevailing model of education is like my first program in BASIC… PRINT “HELLO”. I was telling an entity to do something,

not asking it to figure out how to talk to me, given how i communicate.

Our system is purely focussed on teaching HOW to do stuff, and how to do it well. Not figuring out WHAT to do in the first place. Given no bounded problems to solve, we

wouldn’t know what to solve. Anyone who does is labelled a smart-ass.

Throughout life, with every little thing I have achieved, I have been blown away by the fact that I had no prior idea I could do it. No one told me I could. Many told me I couldn’t.

I’m sure this is common experience, whether you are a genius, or, well… like me. My biggest epiphany, leaving my middle-class ‘educated’ environs for more capitalistic,

entrepreneural climes – was that you don’t need to know how to do something in order to do it. You have access to people, tools, and abilities to FIGURE IT OUT as you go

along.

What an idiotically simple notion. Yet no small thing, considering no one told me, and i wasn’t clever enough to figure out early. 2+2 equals 4 only on paper. In real life, it’s what

YOU make it add it up to… 3 or 5. And that’s the classic difference between societies of Clerks vs. Innovators. Creating objects, processes, services, markets… where none

exist. Something out of nothing. Wealth creation is not a zero sum game.

Has anyone bothered to explain that to the people of Nandigram? Before terrorizing them, that is? Isn’t this at least as valuable as the three R’s?

At the end of the day, it’s about teaching people to do jobs for other people vs. teaching people not to be dependent on such jobs.

You were able to pursue a PhD because you knew how to go about reading books, analyzing their content, etc. However a child would not have developed such capabilities and needs direction, hand-holding and sometimes coercion in the educational process. If a child is left in a library and asked to go pick books of interest, she would in all probability go to the comics section, and stay there for a while.

Point is, the current education system, as faulty as it may seem, works. It may not produce Einsteins at the rate which we want, but it more than makes up for it by keeping kids away from drugs, violence, sex and turning them into disciplined, law-abiding citizens – for the most part.

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1. I think the current day education’s motto is to educate to earn a living but not to educate to earn knowledge. If the goal of education is to acquire skills to earn a living, you are no longer worried about learning, understanding and knowledge.

2. The content of the education is such that the student is exposed only to a minute portion of the whole picture. Where is the breadth knowledge and the understanding of how the content that he/she is being taught fits into bigger picture?

3. The idea of imparting values into the students is totally lost. I am told by many people who work in the field of rural education that by educating the kids in the village, you create an aversion in them towards their own culture, language and economic status. After being educated, they feel ashamed to remain in the villages and to follow their family occupation like farming etc. This is due to lack of bringing proper understanding towards their culture by imparting moral values.

In going with the discussion on education here,
I’ve been watching on the news today that, the Maharashtra government has decided to scrap sex-education from the curriculum in all state-run schools & maybe even centrally-run schools?! How in hell do you explain something like this? Or that our government with “great thinkers” like Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram and the like, had decided to implement 27% reservation in higher-educational institutes for the “oppressed classes”, absolutely & arbitrarily, based on census data from 1931??!!

Like you said, it’s because rather than simplifying the process, these “leaders” choose to complicate it further. With pills to help with side effects of the previous bitter pills, and also give their “followers” the false impression that they care since they have worked very hard to get this pill to them & the payment must be made in precious votes during the next election!

Oh, and the Maharashtra government took this very wise decision since, i quote, “..it corrupts the children.” I think not educating the kids on sex, will corrupt them further!

Barring that, this post has lots of sense in it