Education, as we know it today, is fast losing its zest and much of its relevance. School education, and education in general, stands at a crossroads where fundamental changes have to be made for it to become stimulating and relevant for the young, curious and enquiring minds.

These changes cannot be cosmetic. They have to be as decisive and monumental as the shift from the Theory of Creation to the Theory of Evolution, from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics or from slavery to emancipation.

The intellectual challenges and opportunities facing young minds of today demand that this change be made soon. Otherwise, the gulf between a somewhat archaic school education, on the one hand, and the modern challenges and opportunities of the modern world, on the other, between what children learn in schools and what they really need to learn, will continue to widen.

Public Education: A Background

It is important to understand the historical journey school education has taken from its inception to the present. Without understanding this evolution, it will be difficult to understand the nature of the crisis and the changes that need to be made in order for school education to be more humanistic, exciting and relevant.

Modern learning dates back to more than 2,000 years to pre-Socratic and Socratic periods. The philosophical and scientific advances of those times, with emphasis on rationalism and scientific enquiry, changed much of our thinking. The intellectual discourse, discoveries and inventions of the mediaeval and early modern eras laid the foundations of the present world and the way we live today. Learning, however, remained confined to the few and there was no concept of universal education.

This was soon to change. Come the 17th century, the Industrial Revolution had begun to unfold in Europe. The world was entering a new era, which created its own demands and opportunities. This new era required that a large number of people learn to read and write. A rudimentary public education system had begun to take shape.

Following a 200-year-old pedagogical system has prevented our young minds from developing critical thinking and adequately interacting with the real world around them

Among the many new requirements of the Industrial Revolution, one was the need for an ‘educated’ work force. Suddenly, there was a growing need for hospitals and nurses, schools and teachers, banks and bankers, factories and factory managers, office clerks, accountants, machine operators, storekeepers, salesmen and so on.

About the same time, colonisation increasingly required that ‘natives’ acquire basic language and numeracy skills to support the administrative infrastructure in the colonies. The objective of education was to produce functionaries. That objective has not changed even as we are well into the 21st century.

Rapid industrialisation, coupled with colonisation, set the tone for universal education as we know it today. State schools were established, education was made compulsory, and schools proliferated.

Changing Times

With continuing development, research and rational discourse, attention began to focus on pedagogy. Concerted efforts were made to improve the education system. From being a monolithic, blinkered and one-size-fit-all exercise, schools began to make small strides towards a child-friendly approach to education. Educationists and reformers, such as Dr Maria Montessori, John Dewey, Paulo Freire and several others, helped change the way we think about early education and education in general.

While the efforts of leading educationists and reformers have had a very positive impact on the learning culture in our schools, the broad paradigms of education have rarely been challenged. Dr Ivan Illich’s influential work Deschooling Society, among others, has been a positive step in that direction, but without much-needed traction.

The preponderance of functionalism as a major objective of our educational system has been far too strong to allow moving away from functionalism as the prime objective of education. Somewhere down the road to progress, we lost sight of the fact that we need young minds to think about social justice, gender and racial equality, climate change, deforestation, global warming, extinction of species and inclusivity in all spheres of our lives.

The stagnation in our 200-year-old schooling system has taken a very heavy toll. It has prevented young and enquiring minds from interacting with nature and the real world around them, which is so integral to developing critical thinking. It has prevented us from valuing creativity, imagination, individualism and the wholesome development of the child. This is the crisis our schooling system faces today. This is the crisis our youth are confronted with. This is the crisis that needs immediate attention by educationists and policymakers all over the world.

Standing At A Crossroads

Einstein had said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” He had understood, as indeed many educationists and reformers before and since that, in the post-Industrial era, there is a need for expanding the horizon of education. That there is a need to move away from a largely information-based schooling, which every child is expected to follow regardless of their interest, aptitude and ability. Towards an understanding that children accomplish great feats when their curiosity, imagination and interests are nurtured and supported by the school.

Allowing imagination and individualism to flourish provides children a more meaningful and expanded intellectual platform, and limitless opportunities to find their true calling. It is in discovering and then pursuing their true calling that children truly learn. In the process, they find self-esteem and self-confidence.

Many of these words are familiar, as they have been uttered many a time from the parapets of schools. But when we look at our schools, not as they existed in the Middle Ages but as they exist in the 21st century, we find that these sermons have not been translated into the school learning environment.

We stand today at a crossroads. The shift from information-based schooling to promotion of imagination and critical thinking in individual children is more imperative today than ever before. We owe this to our young generation, and to the generations to come.

The Way Forward

There is a need to seriously and collectively deliberate upon what constitutes nurturing in the context of schools. Nurturing as the main objective, and the individual child placed at the centre of it, requires that we start looking at some of the long-taken-for-granted assumptions more critically.

The first step towards change is to stop worshipping the demi-god we call ‘syllabus’, which is not a sacrosanct document. Instead, schools and teachers should pay more attention to individual children, listen to them and focus on nurturing them. Except for basic language and numerical skills, not all children need to learn the same thing. Not all children have the same interest in or aptitude for all subjects taught in schools. Not all children will excel in, nor should they be judged for, something they find little interest in and use for.

The other demi-god that needs to be demolished is ‘examination’. Examination, particularly during the early years of schooling, is the antithesis of meaningful learning. Yet, for most teachers and school heads, the need for a final examination is as self-evident as the need to eat or sleep for keeping our bodies healthy.

Yet another demi-god to be demolished is ‘competition’. Competition is unhealthy and antithetical to the development of the ‘whole person’. Competition in schools recognises those who win, and further reinforces the ‘weakness’ of those who do not win. Most children feel competitive in terms of what grades they get, reducing learning to simply a matter of getting good grades.

In today’s world, with all the intellectual and material resources available to us, there is no reason why schools should continue to be old-fashioned conveyor-belt operations. Instead, schools ought to be citadels of imagination, creativity and individualism.

Celebrating Diversity

We pay lip service to the fact that all children are different and that this difference must be respected. We have known all along that some children enjoy school, others find it regimenting; some enjoy class subjects, others find more interest in sports; some find interest in maths and things mechanical, others bond well with animals or find interest in gardening.

Some find more interest in drawing and painting, others listening to nursery rhymes and writing stories. We know, and see in our everyday observations, that some children enjoy music or playing a specific instrument, while others enjoy cooking or reading. There may be children who do not show interest in any of the above. It is then the school’s moral and professional responsibility to find what does interest these children and involve them in those pursuits and activities.

This may be a threshold most teachers and policymakers are afraid to confront, let alone cross. But cross it they must.

The writer is the founder-principal of a private school in Karachi. He is also the executive director of the Sindh Education Reform Initiative (SERI)

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 31st, 2021