Purpose of Education - Capacity Building Session

On 27th Jan 2013 CRY Delhi Volunteers Group invited Ms. Simi Sara Thomas, Teacher at St. Thomas School, Delhi, for an interactive discussion with volunteers on her views on ways to impart education and purpose of education, published in The Viewspaper and Ule. The session was really great as it changed perception of volunteers about purpose of education and made them rethink about where the current education system is leading to.



Some key take away points from the session were:
1. Purpose of education should be three-fold:
(a) To provide helping hands to students.
(b) To make students unleash their imagination.
(c) To make students learn through mistakes.
2. A famous quotation of Albert Einstein goes as "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." Since rote learning has become vital component of current education system, imagination is facing huge ignorance. Overall, education is standardizing children and making them lose imagination.
3. According to Sir Ken Robinson - Creativity is as important in education as literacy because of following reasons:
(a) One can't predict what the future is going to look like. Students starting school in 2006 will use their knowledge and learning till about 2065; by then the world around will be drastically changed. So, it is better to prepare students to face novel situations than to restrict their brain to think only in current scenario.
(b) If education is about empowering individuals then the best way to do this will be enabling them to think of themselves. This in turn is possible only if we encourage students to be creative.
4. Citing Sir Ken Robinson again - If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will not come up with original. With age creativity fades away, so it's best to trigger creativity early in life. This can be done in following ways:
(a) Encouraging students to make mistakes.
(b) Better than last point, help students find a way out of mess they create through their mistakes.
(c) Mistake = Missed Take. In Bollywood, single scene involves numerous missed takes, but that never means that producer and director quit in between. So, a student should also take mistake as a new learning rather than as a lost opportunity.
5. A famous quotation of Pablo Picasso goes as "Every child is an artist, the problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." Current world scenario is well depicted in another quotation of Sir Ken Robinson, which goes as "We don't grow into creativity we grow out of it or rather we get educated out of it." This scenario is also well evident from current priority of most of educational institutions which is as follows:
Highest Priority --- Maths, Science and Language
Mid Level Priority --- Humanities and Social Sciences
Lowest Priority --- Music and Arts
Beyond Consideration (taken only as pastime) --- Dance
However, creativity honing ability goes down consistently from bottom to up in this list.
6. Learning already discovered facts is important to ensure following things:
(a) One does waste precious and limited time in reinventing wheel.
(b) There is some base knowledge over which creativity can be applied to bring new things into existence; otherwise imaginative thoughts will take a person to various directions leading ultimately to nowhere.

Some informative and impactful videos referred during the session were "Sir_Ken_Robinson__Do_schools_kill_creativity", "RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms" and "Sir Ken Robinson - Changing Paradigms".