Text of a Seminar given by Professor A.N.Maheshwari
There has been a world wide expansion of electronic information during the past decade. Our experience of 1984, when we introduced computers in schools in India, is already out of date. Computers today, instead of being used in isolated stand -alone mode, are being increasingly connected with each other through local area networks and global networks. I have come across a newspaper report which mentions that over 30 million computers in the USA alone are connected to the Internet. Within a year it is estimated that 50 million users globally will be accessing information on the Internet. Information on every conceivable topic of human interest is being put on the Internet by individuals and institutions. Information on education, specially school education, covering wide spectrum of fields such as early childhood education, lesson plans for teaching of subject disciplines at different grade levels, assessment items, tests and tools for educational research, to mention a few, are available on the Internet in an organised and easy to access form. I will mention a few examples in support of this claim. To some colleagues from the Department of Education in Science and Mathematics in the NCERT, I gave a demonstration on how search engines can be used for locating web sites containing information of specific interests, say science education. By entering the key words 'Secondary Science Curriculum' on one of the standard search engines, in this case INFOSEEK, a list of sites appeared on the screen which included among others the National Science Standards and the Home Page put up by the National Association of Science Teachers in the US. To our pleasant surprise we found that the web site we had hit upon was a treasure trove containing lessons plans for teachers for providing science education as per the National Science Standards. The material has been arranged there grade wise for the twelve years of school education in the USA. We narrowed down our search to 'Newton's Third Law of Motion' and to our surprise we found that there were several sub-topics related to the Newton's Third Law of Motion for which lesson plans were available. When we further zoomed on free-body diagram, a well written paper came on the screen with pedagogic suggestions on how to teach this topic to students of grade 12. To another colleague I demonstrated the use of the Internet by downloading a research study entitled "Challenges of Mathematics Education". This information turned out to be an annotated bibliography of major researches in mathematics education carried out in the USA during the past five years. The two experiences I have described are exemplar of how the vast body of information relevant to our work in school education can be tapped from the Internet. Accessing and dissemination of educational material is now available globally for near zero cost to all those who want it. However, knowledge of mere existence of information in the World Wide Web will not be enough unless we know how to access it, classify it and process it for solving some problem. Therefore, in the information dominated world, the preferred skills will be those which are required for using the readily accessible information. According to Bill Gates, nature of work in the information society will divide workers into two categories: (i) high-paid knowledge workers, and (ii) low-paid service workers. High-paid knowledge workers will be those who know how to manage information and process it. The society will give high premium to their skills. In India also the class of high-paid knowledge workers is slowly emerging . It is not uncommon to hear that the corporate sector, foreign banks, etc. pay annual salary of Rs.10 lakh or more to some of their junior executives, irrespective of their academic qualifications. Whereas many persons, though have to their credit highest academic degress like Ph.D., are either unemployed or are underemployed at fraction of such wages. What should worry all of us is that even now India contributes to the global economy by its people carrying out tasks meant for low-paid service workers. In the last century people from India went to Africa, Caribbean Islands, Mauritius, Fiji and many other countries as farm workers. The situation has not much changed over the past hundred and fifty years. Only the destinations have changed. Even now the majority of people who have left our frontiers to work in the Gulf countries, Saudi Arabia, etc. do low paid unskilled work. The question, therefore, is what type of education needs to be given in our schools to shift the balance of our workforce from low-paid service to high-paid service? Another feature of the information technology is that it is rapidly changing. Information processing hardware and software have a turn-over of two-to-three years. More advanced computers emerge on the scene before we are able to familiarise ourselves fully with all the features of the systems we had purchased as the state-of-art technology. The type of computers which we selected in 1984 with fanfare for our schools are, at best, museum pieces now. But even today we continue to meet the recurring cost for operating these machines in about three thousand schools. The BBC microcomputers which were given to schools have a Random Access Memory (RAM) of 64 kilobytes. Whereas now common desk tops have RAM of 16 megabytes and hard-disk memory of over 1 gigabyte = 1000 megabytes. New models of computers superior in all respects to their preceding versions keep appearing about every two years with more attractive prices. Even the operating systems of the microprocessor based computers have changed over the years from BASIC to DOS to Windows. The DOS was considered extremely versatile when it appeared on PCs but its commands had to be learnt for using software on PCs. With the emergence of Windows operating system, computers can be used with skills not more complex to learn than are required to use the remote of VCR or television. The systems with Windows are operated through icons using an electronic mouse. No commands are to be recalled from memory for using the Windows' software. Those of us who have used Windows - 95 for exchanging information on e-mail would have experienced the thrill of interactintg with persons in any part of the globe with the same ease as with a person sitting next door. In such a situation mere running fast may leave us standing where we were unless organisations and their personnel reinvent themselves continually for keeping pace with the rapid shift in information technology. CONCERNS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS ON EDUCATION I will next address some glaring concerns which need to be tackled by the school system in India in the context of its inadequacies and the overwhelming implications placed on it by an information society.These concerns which are causing tension to educators, students, teachers and parents are: Improvement in education cannot be left to market forces or to some kind of self regulation to put things right when they go wrong. Extraordinary expansion of knowledge and human beings' capacity to assimilate it. Competition for raising quality versus the concerns for equality of opportunity. Overcrowded curricula and lack of learning conditions. Anxiety about their future in young people and lack of guidance for finding pathways suited to their abilities. Distress in the school-learners and school-dropouts at the shortage of opportunities for making them viable in the society. Lack of training in learning to learn. If we examine the present school curricula of any of the school subjects whether Mathematics, Science or Social Sciences, we cannot fail to notice inordinate amount of information contained in them. Generally special learning conditions are being arranged by parents to enable their children to cope with the curricular requirements. The additional support of the parent may be in the form of purchase of expensive books and guides brought out by private publishers and hiring paid tutor support, if coaching by parents themselves is not feasible. This type of situation begs the question whether laying down of uniform curricula and common public examinations are taking care of the equality of learning opportunity for all children, specially when the parental economic backgrounds and the quality of schools where they study can be poles apart? Imposition of an unrealistically heavy curricular demand without providing the necessary learning conditions in schools is contributing to a widening gulf between the children who come from homes with parents belong- ing to the category of haves and those who come from homes with parents belonging to the category of havenots. Over and above these disparities even the young persons coming from the have-background undergo extreme stress on account of anxiety about their future. I do not have to emphasise this concern as many of you have children studying in secondary and senior secondary classes. What is the way out and what is it that the NCERT can do to make school education relevant to the emerging needs? First, we should not despair as solutions can be found even of most difficult problems which on their face may seem extremely intractable. We have to look for the leads which can provide directions for exploring the solution.
This may be the most familiar to us as all our school education is for of
learning to know. However, our approach of learning to know may have to
undergo substantial change specially when access to information is easy.
In an information society use of memory for recall of information may no
longer be regarded as an enviable asset. Our textbooks which are loaded
with facts and details may have to be reviewed for deletion of all such
information which is not used for developing higher levels of cognition.
This will also provide relief to children from the burden of the curriculum
load. To make my point I will use an example from school science. All the
books of the secondary science say that 'an atom consists of a nucleus with
negatively charged electrons revolving in Bohr orbits around the nucleus
- nucleus consists of positively charged particles called protons and electrically
neutral particles called neutrons - the protons and neutrons are held together
by short range nuclear forces and so on.' Children will memorise this information
because of the requirement of the examination . We would be deluding ourselves
if we think that a 14-15 year old boy or girl will be able to form in mind
the correct picture of the nucleus involving lengths of size 0.00000000000001
cm and particles possessing mass of 1.67 x 10-27 kg. These are examples
of what I call information. Even if a student manages to memorise such facts
to what application can these be put to? Why do we have to force children
to memorise information which is unrelated to any experience or can be used
in understanding of some other phenomenon? There is a need to shift emphasis
from 'details' to 'ability' to 'apply'. For example, instead of explaining
the structure of molecules with diagrams giving bond lengths and bond angles,
the shift of learning can be made to use the molecular hypothesis for understanding
of everyday phenomena like evaporation, solution of salts in liquids, pressure-volume
and temperature relationship, etc.. It may be appreciated that the learning
in school will continue to be around subject disciplines as they form the
treasure bequeathed by the best minds to the mankind as heritage. What I
am suggesting is that there is no need to feel threatened or insecure on
account of the vast volume of information or its exponential growth. We
may instead concentrate on a small number of concepts to suit children's
their interest and go in depth. The learning has, therefore, to be shifted
to in-depth exploration of concepts to enable learning to know to result
in learning to learn. Once learning to learn is acquired, benefit that opportunity
to education can give will become life long. If through school education
learning to know is to be made an effective instrument for developing learning
to learn a cooperative effort will be required from all of us in the NCERT,
as we are directly involved in curriculum preparation, development of textbooks
and teaching aids, and teacher training, I next come to learning to do.
It basically means vocationalisation of education. But according to the
Delors' report its implications go beyond vocational and professional education.
For the new jobs the preferred occupational skills will include life skills
such as ability to work with one another, interpersonal relationship for
appreciation of differing points of view and ability to resolve conflicts.
These will be indicated by the score of the emotional quotient than of the
intelligence quotient. Also, the nature of work is expected to change continually
. Skills for carrying out a specific nature of work once acquired may not
remain useful for a long time on account of changes in technology and other
related developments. One time education will, therefore, fall short of
making a person employable for the full period of adult life. Each person
will have to keep pace with new knowledge, new competencies for meeting
the challenge of changing occupations, some of which might not exist today
or even can be anticipated. Most of us have faith in the strength of the
academic and professional preparations with which we had left the portals
of the higher education institutions where we had studied for seeing us
through our jobs all the way till we attain our superannuation. We feel
complacent and seldom keep up with new developments. This feeling of security
will no longer be available henceforth. For quite sometime I was totally
convinced that with my M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics I could only teach
and do research in physics for my living. This is a self-imposed narrow
view point.There are many examples of persons who achieved outstanding success
in life only after they had changed midway their interest to areas totally
unrelated to their initial education. Even for remaining effective in our
initial areas of specialisation, continual updating will be crucial for
keeping pace with the developments in our disciplines. I have already mentioned
that the nature of work is changing fast. With the skills for carrying out
only one type of work the danger is of finding oneself redundant as technologies
or processes for the task will change. Therefore, all of us will have to
acquire new skills and new competencies as we advance in age. In the information
society, individual ability may not be adequate for tackling problems which
can be best solved by working in groups as they will require input of different
skills and perspectives. Therefore, the society will give premium to abilities
like working in groups, skills for solving problems and resolving conflicts
in comparison to skills for production of goods and providing service. According
to me the ability to work together is the weakest in most of us. Schools
promote individual abilities through competitions which are reinforced by
rewarding individual merit instead of team effort. Therefore, the pedagogical
shift to group learning will be crucial for developing learning to do.This
can be best initiated from the school stage itself. The next linked pillar
to learning to do is learning to live together.
In spite of the two world wars man has not learnt the art of living together.
More than 20 million persons all over the world have died in various wars
and conflicts since the second world war. Painful events in Afghanistan,
ethnic conflicts in the erstwhile Yugoslavia, Gulf War, demolition of the
Babri Masjid and Bombay riots in India would not have happened had we learnt
to live together. Therefore, what is required is to develop in each person
understanding of other people , their cultures, their mutual interdependence
for carrying out joint projects and for peace. Ability to live in harmony
with all creations of nature will be possible only through aesthetic appreciation
of the flora and fauna , which has evolved on the earth along with the human
form of life. There are alarming warning signals that the life on this planet
will get destabilised when the ecological balance is disturbed. We will
have to enforce collectively universal mandates such as that no form of
life be exploited for pleasure or for commercial gain. We move next to the
last pillar, the learning to be.
Learning to be as an important universal recommendation was first put forward
by the Unesco in 1972. It has been reiterated by the Delors Commission and
recognised as a crucial pillar of education for the twenty-first century.
In simple terms it means that for human beings their inner freedom is as
important as their external freedom. Purpose of life has to go beyond playing
the role of a wage earner and a family provider. Each one of us has to have
some personal mission in life to fulfill beyond achieving happiness through
material gains. It is natural to ask sometimes questions like : Who am I?
What is the purpose of my life? Am I living only to earn for myself and
for my family? In India we have a long tradition of training in learning
to be. We are inheritors of the highest search by our thinkers and philosophers
for finding answers to such questions . What needs to be done is to integrate
the eternal values with contextual values relevant to the present society.
Learning to be can be best developed by consciously introducing value education
in school curriculum. If we know the learning to be, the chances are that
we might be able to organise ourselves from being dehumanised or being exploited
as human slaves and may also have the strength of conviction to stand up
against ideologies of individuals or groups which are destructive to mankind
or are against minorities. An Appeal What I have shared here in this paper
are the four icons or the four pillars of education for the education for
the 21st century. We would have to apply our mind to decide whether they
are relevant to the context of education in India. Ours is one of the two
most populous countries of the world with the additional stigma of having
the majority of illiterates of the world population. India continues to
remain at the rock bottom of the world-development-index. Odds are heavily
against persons belonging to this country in their ability to share equitably
the world wealth. Therefore, we have the task ahead of finding the relevant
curriculum to meet the needs of students who are lucky enough to have access
to formal schooling and also for the teeming millions who will be without
its support. The NCERT is fortunate to have a competent and dedicated faculty
capable of meeting the challenge I have reflected in this exposition. Pofessor
Philip Hughes had closed the Bangkok Seminar with the following quotation
of John Gardner , which I find most appropriate for this occasion as well.
"I know that there is in each of you, a flame that will not go out.
I know that sometimes it burns low, that at times it is almost smothered
by weariness and defeat - but I know it springs back to life. I know that
each of you has within you more power to do good than you have ever used,
more faithfulness than has ever been asked of you, more strength than has
ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given."
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