Aug 10, 2020. Updated: Dec 26, 2022.

Education

What differentiates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our capacity to think; and only education can hone this capacity. This makes education both responsible as well as necessary for the progress of our species. Therefore, it is tenable to say that education a fundamental right and impart it to all without commoditising it.

There are societies that boast about their education so much so that they act no different or worse than those who they label as uneducated. This is judged by looking at their type of wastes generated, it's proportion and management, cleanliness of public places, how animals are treated and raised, how the public sector workforce behave, etc. Such societies are not as educated as they think or claim to be, and their feeling of being educated is in fact a feeling of arrogance and blindness, because the more you learn the more you realise that there is to learn.

So, what is education?

Qualifications are not education; they are merely eligibilities for a job — a testament of a particular knowledge. But education is not knowledge, but the ability to acquire and use knowledge. Education is not the ability to blabber, it is the ability to observe, think and act. Education is not the ability to not make mistakes, it is ability to learn from mistakes and acquire skills to never repeat them. Education is not the knowledge of any language but the knowledge of what and how to communicate with that language. The ability to think is education.

The most practical definition of education I have come across is the literal meaning of the Malayāḷam word for education: vidyābhyāsaṁ — a portmanteau of vidya (knowledge) and abhyāsaṁ (practice, application or exercise). By this definition, educational institutions should not merely engage in imparting knowledge, but also engage in training students to exercise their knowledge. For this, skills such as critical thinking, reasoning and emotional intelligence must be inculcated first.

The fundamental goal of education must be to prepare students for life, and not jobs. That is not to say that livelihood isn't taken care of. A job is merely a part of life and when life itself is focussed, job is focussed too.

Since life is tough, education must cultivate a strong mindset among students. Because our economic policies are rightfully aimed at improving the standards of living of our society, people tend to miss out lessons coming from tough disadvantageous experiences. Therefore, education must mimic tough and disadvantageous life in the curriculum. This will reduce cost of operation too.

Since life will gift many failures, it is only sensible that education must subject students to several failures as part of the cirriculum, and teach them to handle them.

Since sociology teaches that diverse culture is essential to the progress and resilience of human species, culture is an element to be preserved and evolved. What better way to ensure this but to inculcate cultural belongingness and cultural integrity among the upcoming generation. Therefore, education must be rooted in the local culture of the region.

Here are certain aspects of the current educational model discussed in the light of the above design principles.

Admissions

Since education is a fundamental right and must be imparted to all, admissions to schools must be as simple as parents visiting institutions and admitting their children with no formalities with regards to age, caste, religion, gender, economic class, previous school, parent's education or their income. That simple!

Schools must admit all those who are intellectually capable of learning, including the disabled. I understand the need for special schools for the intellectually challenged, but I do not understand the need of special schools for the visual, hearing and speech impaired. Schools are the first place to socialise for humans, and any demarcation among students will demarcate them after schooling as well.

For instance, the world we design does not work for the disabled by default. Laws and regulations must be accounted in designs to make them compatible with them. Also, the "abled" cannot communicate with the blind, the deaf and the speech impaired. But, they can communicate with the abled using their skills. In a way, it is the abled who are disabled.

We grew up in two different worlds, learned different languages and followed different communication methods right from where we first socialised — the school. As years passed, we got acclimatized to this world, and post school, we are thrown out to a similarly demarcated world to live. But lacking even the basic faculty of communication, we do not mingle with them. We develop sympathy for them, but not empathy. And being a dominant power, we design the world for us and run it pushing them to obscurity.

There is only one world to live — no separate earth for the impaired; nor are there separate roads, hospitals, farms, restaurants, air, water, soil, or food for them. So, it's best that we all start living together right from where we first socialise — schools.

The question is, how practical is it to put the disabled together with the others in schools?

What we do in a school is learn and the only factor that limits learning is our intellectual level. The visually impaired, hearing impaired and speech impaired are not intellectually inferior, they simply lack some faculties which are either compensated by an increased functioning of other faculties or by assistive technologies. Therefore, a truly inclusive school is a practical proposition.

Such an arrangement will certainly aggravate the syllabus in terms of more languages, skills and techniques to learn not deteriorate the functioning of the classroom but will never inhibit learning. It will teach all skills to mingle, interact, communicate and share the one world with each other. When students grow up, these values will manifest naturally in the outside world.

Teachers serve a fundamental role in the success of such unified classes. They must be trained and educated accordingly, in the art of managing both the disabled and non-disabled alike. They must learn to communicate in various methods as per the student they are managing. But they will not have to repeat their teachings for the abled and disabled using different communication methods. Technology can play a role in spontaneous translation of what the teacher teaches in whatever method. We could see a blind teacher taking a science class to a group of students comprising largely of non-disabled students with the help of technology.

Such inclusive changes may slow down the syllabus. But what matters is what you learn, not how much you learn. Schools must take a sensible approach of first helping students learn emotional and social intelligence, then cognitive skills and finally academic subjects such as science, farming¹ and sustainable lifestyle.

A little late introduction of science and mathematics will not hamper students' scientific prowess. Human beings have an affinity to learn and understand a particular subject better at a particular stage in life. Children have an affinity to learn and cultivate certain skill sets that are hard to cultivate when grown up. Similarly, adults have an affinity to learn and understand certain subjects better and faster than they would in their childhood. Many of the topics of science and mathematics I learned but never understood in school now seem to be simple. Sometimes, when I revisit my old text books, I am surprised to find topics that I learned recently with no recollection of learning it in school. We forget much of the science and mathematics that we learn in school simply because we never understood them completely or never used them. As we undergo an natural intellectual development, we understand these topics better; which makes me question as to whether we wasted our time in school.

Could we have learned and cultivated something else during our childhood that is too hard now, such as some habits, the skills of thinking, form questions, solve problems and reason, extensive communication skills including skills to communicate with the disabled, extensive health education, emotional management, decision making skills, exercises that improve our intelligence, etc.?

Few schools have now started giving importance to such skills, but they do it with their primary focus on academia, which only puts more load on children. These skills are not taught extensively and with practical experience such that students actually cultivate them instead of just knowing them.

This is not to say that children must not be taught maths and science — they indeed must be, but not in such an extensive way and at an early age as done in the current system. It does not serve any purpose. Unless you work in the field of science and engineering, basic science and mathematics is all that is required for every day living. And those who intend to get into science and engineering can learn more of these subjects in later classes. Only knowledge that is put to use stays. Life skills will be used through out our life making it an apt subject to focus in schools.

A practical guide is to start such changes is by setting the right goals. Goals determine our actions and our actions then build the system. If our goals are wrong, the system we build will work against us, like what is happening with our food, farming or education system. The goal for our education system must be to prepare students for life.

Medium

Education must prepare students for life and culture is an inalienable aspect of a good social life. Moreover, diversity contributes to human progress on the long run. And the only way to preserve diversity is to practice it. Therefore, education must be rooted in local culture. This means that the medium of teaching must be the regional language — the mother tongue of the respective region.

The discussion on English medium and regional language medium of teaching in the context on Bhārata can be read here.

Uniforms

Some folks question the need for uniforms, that isn't it a violation of one's fundamental right to wear clothing of choice. No right is absolute. Sometimes, multiple rights overlap. Each right is subject to at least common sense if not others: blabber while observing a two minute silence in memory of the death cannot be justified by saying that you have free speech. Doing so is disregard for social manners, is stupid and illogical.

If choice justifies wearing any manner of clothing in schools, then a student wearing a swimsuit to class must be justified too, which to me is preposterous. The argument of choice for uniforms is flawed.

Also, we have a case of overlapping rights — the right of an individual overlapping the right of an institution — where I believe that the right that serves a larger and more relevant purpose contextually must be preferred.

As to why we need uniforms, one of the reasons is to bring a sense of uniformity that eliminates certain differences that could negatively influence a child's psychology: such as the reflection of financial disparity in clothing. Rich students can wear great looking and expensive dresses while poor students cannot afford such clothings, thus paving way for certain complexes in young student's mind (had it been an adult there would not be such psychological consequences). Since everyone wears the same dress in school and thus maintains a form of 'sameness', such disparities doesn't reflect until they are groomed psychologically to see differences positively.

If the need for uniforms is established, since education must be rooted in local culture, I propose that uniforms must be based on ethnic clothing of the student. Besides, there is a practical reason of comfort and convenience as well. The most comfortable and convenient dresses for a culture are those that evolved in that culture considering its climate, what people do and even how people look (visual aesthetics). There are no reasons to neglect these incentives and adopt foreign garments as uniforms.

Note that uniforms must based on the ethnicity of students rather than the school's location. Let there be uniformity in terms of the colour and material of the uniform, but let the uniforms be as diverse as the students — mundu, veshti, pyjama, kurta, salwar, saree, Indian skirt and blouse, etc. This to me is a celebration of true diversity in schools yet maintaining a certain degree of uniformity without defeating the purpose of uniforms.

There is a lot of talking about gender neutral uniforms. There is no such thing as a gender neutral dress. Dresses aren't made for a gender; they are designed and stitched for the body — and body is a sexual characteristic. Because sex is distinctive and male bodies are different from female bodies, we cannot have a uniform that is neutral to the sex either. Take for example a pair of trousers (which is touted to be a gender neutral dress or unisex dress). Whichever epochs of fashion we analyse, trousers for men, or males, are different from trousers for women, or females in terms of shape, size, and design. Such differences can be found in every male and female dresses.

It can still be argued that with trousers and shirts, or unisex dresses, we can bring down the visual differences between male and female to almost neutrality, which is true. But my question is, why do we have to actively bring down the physical and psychological differences between men and women in the first place? Is this how we ensure equality — by hiding the differences between men and women? Seems stupid! The differences between man and women are endowed by either God or nature — depending on what you believe. Such differences are natural and therefore there is no reason to meddle with them let alone hide them.

Classrooms

Knowledge, at the most basic level, is transmitted orally under a direct apprenticeship of a master with real personal interactions. The next level is written form of knowledge with texts and drawings. With the advent of technology, virtual classrooms with on-screen interactions and audio visual content are the newest level.

We must inculcate in students not the knowledge of a thing, but the knowledge of learning it. Give that one is likely to find lectures and books on a subject than video courses, and given that the nuances of most subjects (such as IT protocols) are still served using words, the skill to learn from these basic forms of oral and written knowledge is fundamental and versatile to the learning mind. The best way to inculcate this to base the curriculum on such learning methodology, forcing students to learn this particular art of learning.

The old school physical classroom with writing boards and real interactions between teachers and students are the best environment for such learning. This is because, for the following three reasons, such classrooms allow the most direct involvement for students in learning, and teachers in teaching.

• Direct interactions between teachers and students.
• Reliance on the basic storage form of knowledge (lectures and texts).
• Use of the quickest note taking method of writing down on a board or a paper.

Two contributions of digital technology to classrooms are high tech infrastructure and online/virtual classrooms. Both are discussed.

High Tech Classrooms

High tech classrooms with audio visual equipments running presentations, animations, interactive pages and videos do allow direct interactions between students and teachers, and also allow hand writing notes, but they do not primarily rely on the basic storage forms of knowledge. Instead, they rely on digital assets. These materials do expedite the understanding of tough concepts in science, engineering and mathematics, but students understanding these phenomena a little slowly from lectures, books and cognitive visualisations would give a larger benefit of training their mind of these skills. By the time they leave school, they will master these skills ready to learn anything.

Some might argue that audio visual equipments can be used to host e-books while teaching. In most curriculums, textbooks are provided to students, and referring them on their respective classroom desks is much easier than following the same texts on a common screen in the class. More importantly, hardly any teacher follows the pedagogy of going over textbooks line by line. She usually teaches the topic to be taught and the students are expected to read the textbooks later.

Then there is the practice of completely digitizing the learning process itself, forcing every student to buy a digital device like a laptop. This does not increase learning by any degree. If anything, it only decreases it since students are prone to various distractions of a digital device. Add to this the effects of more screen time and increased cost of education.

Honestly, I do not see any value addition to learning by the use of audio, visual and other digital devices in classrooms. But it does indeed add incredible value in impressing parents and influencing their decision for high spending.

Online Classes

The most recent technology offering is online classes, the adoption of which is perhaps the greatest decadence in the field education. The quality of teaching and learning fall significantly with online classes because we evolved over centuries learning through direct interactions with teachers and books (or equivalents), acclimatising our brain to learn from the direct perception of the information. Online classes do not offer this environment. Digital devices are novelties that the pleasurable side of our brains enjoys, which is why most people get addicted to screens. But the learning side of our brain does not really like them, which is why most people find it easier to read physical books than e-books.

Online classes also contributed to the loss of experienced quality teachers. They quit simply because they cannot not adapt to the digital classroom infrastructure. Most of them never worked on computers throughout their life; thus now spending hours just to make few presentation slides and teach a topic online, which they could have done in just under an hour in an offline class. The fact that institutions try several online learning platforms over a short period of time (some of which are poorly designed and developed), and that parents and students call teachers for software troubleshooting make things worse for them².

Religion

Education and religion travel in opposite directions. One subjugates your thinking and the other liberates and encourages it. One nurtures you to search and find truth, while the other gives you a set of statements and demands your belief in them. Fundamentally, education and religion travel in opposite directions.

Despite educational institutions not being a religious institutions, attempts to "religify" them are widespread. Many institutions use statues, quotes, rituals and prayers of a particular religion in the institution, despite the religious diversity of students there. With the exception of photos or statues of their patron, or quotes from scriptures pertaining to education, and holidays for religious festivals[^festivals], every other religious influence should be barred from educational institutions.

A student is religion-agnostic. Children who are learning faith, doctrine and science, are in no position to choose their religion. Therefore, their so called religion is an indoctrinated faith; not a chosen one. Choices by indoctrination are not choices made of free will or an exercise of the freedom of religion. For this reason and also because education and religion travel in opposite directions, there is no place for religious practices in educational institutions.

However, a religiously indoctrinated child experiences a violation of conscience when religious practices or adornments are denied. Very young students may not experience this violation since they aren't fully indoctrinated yet; but teenagers and older students will experience this violation since they are already indoctrinated. Therefore, religious practices and articles restricted to the individual can be accommodated to reasonable extend among teenagers and older students; and they thereafter must be subjected to a logical and anti-radicalisation class to de-indoctrinate them.

To what extent must religious practices and articles be accommodated is simple: accommodate them until they become physiologically and psychologically unhealthy to the individual and to the group, and until they conflict with the process of education or the discipline of the institution. An assessment of the use of Islamic head covers in educational institutions will explain this better.

Campus Politics

A students' union is a tenable body as it protects the students against any exploitation by the management. But there is no need for multiple students' unions formed on the basis of political ideologies. Such unions don't serve students but instead, they serve the political parties of the state. They act as breeding grounds for politically brainwashed students who, upon finishing their student life, either join the respective political parties or become their sympathisers.

Students are at their more arrogant, aggressive and violent days in high school and college. They are likely to be driven less by sense and more by emotion and adulation towards a certain figures. Such a mindset can be easily exploited. Campus politics as it is seen today with affiliations to political parties does more harm than good to those who take active participation in it.

Technology

Technology education must be practical and useful. So schools must teach students critical applications around which our modern lives revolve. Operations systems, email services, Internet using, instant messaging, etc. are example of critical software.

The software taught must be open source. Most schools teach proprietary software to students with the argument that they are more functional for professions. But education must prepare students for life, not for jobs. So schools must teach open source software for since they are safer and economical than proprietary software³. Re-learning open source software after many years of acclimatization might be easy for technologically gifted students, but for others, it is a monstrous task. Once students pass out, they are stuck in the software ecosystem taught to them. Let companies train their workers to use proprietary software or let professional institutions teach.

Schools must teach technology (or computer science) from a problem solving perspective. Problem solving is a cognitive skill and can be applied across many aspects in our life, not just in computer science. And you don't actually need a programming language or clock screen time in order to learn problem solving. Its pure brain work.

Schools must teach students to use technology with digital security, privacy, best practices, and productivity in mind. The current curriculum simply teaches the software and leaves these factors to the software.

Schools must teach students to responsibly use technology, guarding themselves against screen, app and social network addiction, making them understand that moments are more beautiful and lively when experienced through our sense organs than through our smartphone camera, that offline relationship and interactions are more human-like that their online counterparts, etc.

Teachers

If education is the foundation for the progress of society, then teachers are not merely builders of nations, but builders of the humanity itself. Good teachers are a dying breed, but I reckon that certain thoughts can turn this around.

The currently methodology for hiring teachers is their academic excellence. This leaves out many essential traits that teachers must have, such as being exemplary citizens with impeccable social, civic, ethical, moral and common senses, and their practice in their personal lives; which is important for the reason that teachers aren't just imparting knowledge, but imparting values. Only those who have and practice certain values can impart them to others.

Teachers can have religious, political and other ideologies but must never be enslaved to them. For once enslaved, they become tools of propaganda for their ideologies, when their job is to help students weed out facts from the pile.

Teachers must be the highest paid workers in an educational institution, followed by the non-teaching staff. Among teachers, those teaching the lower classes must be the paid higher than those teaching the higher classes — the most important lessons of education are imparted in lower classes, thus requiring the most skilful and patient teachers there. But, to justify such a pay scale, the curriculum itself has to change to teaching the hardest skills and cultivating the most hated yet desirable traits during early days of education.

The hiring of teachers have become corrupt with nepotism, vested interests and bribery. How can quality teachers be expected to teach the upcoming generation when the very fundamental criteria to such posts is a large sum of money⁴?

Teachers must be held high in societies. There must be no positions of power which a teacher must address as 'sir' or 'madam'. It must be otherwise — teachers, must be addressed as 'sir' or 'madam', or by their cultural equivalent. In India, we follow the British system of addressing prominent positions as 'sir' or 'madam' — a practice that is odd since Britishers have left India some 75 years back, but a practice that I am not intolerant to either. No matter what system we use, no teacher must call anyone 'sir' or 'madam'.

Many institutions, wallowing in their arrogance of management, give certain administrative responsibilities to the teaching staff. This, I find to be exploitative and incompetent for the reason that it to conduct the non-administrative tasks that there is the management and the non-teaching staffs. Teachers are there to fulfil an extremely hard task of educating to students of varied intelligence, commitments and thought processes, in the most consistent manner year by year. This is a time consuming ever evolving skill set. Any additional roles will only slice off their teaching time and most importantly infuriate them which will affect their commitment. Let teachers focus on teaching and teaching alone.