Teaching for the future

One of the important questions about the design of learning environments for children is about which curriculum to choose and what skills to expect the children to acquire as a result of their schooling. Many thinkers such as Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein have questioned the relevance of having young children at specified ages to learn and repeat on demand a lot of facts unconnected with each other in an intrinsic way.

This was probably useful and a competitive advantage when books were scarce, explorers would have to go to places far removed from libraries or knowledgeable people and would need to rely on information they had with themselves. Therefore facts were useful, and formulas in Mathematics, Equations in Chemistry, Historical dates and so on were desirable to know.

But with the present Internet, cellular, wi-fi, wi-max etc. there is almost no place where information and loads of it is not readily available. And thanks to GPS, even one’s physical location could be made known to others.

There is a very interesting satire on the design and justification of obsolete curricula in the face of changing times, in an essay published in 1939 and equally relevant today, except that the rate of change is even faster. The Saber-Tooth Curriculum as it was called is easily accessible, through this link. Also, as we all know, you could go to Google and type the above title, and you would get not only the original article, but further derived works, adapted works and a discussion on the points made by the essay.

So, it is clear that access to raw information alone would not be a great advantage. In near future, having lots of information will be unimportant. Instead, far more important will be how you process the information. Information is easily available to everyone these days thanks to Google, so the differentiation lies in conceptual understanding and its application

At the end of the schooling period, a child should in addition to the Delor’s principles of Learning to Know, Learning to do, Learning to be and Learning to live together, should develop abilities and capacities to process information for useful purposes. Various such models exist, and one well accepted model is the Welford”s model which prescribes the following:

• take in information through the senses and temporarily store all of these inputs prior to sorting them out
• the inputs that are seen as relevant to the decision are then stored in the short-term memory
• a decision is made by comparing the information in the short-term memory with previous experiences stored in the long-term memory
• with reference to the long term memory for the required action the decision is carried out
• the action and the results are stored for future reference
• the whole process then begins again.

In a well designed schooling system, the abilities to seek, filter, organize and create meaning out of information would become much more important than merely regurgitating prescribed learning materials.

We will continue to deliberate upon how such goals are planned to be reached.

MM Pant