ACADEMIA
I feel over-exhausted as I returned late from my Birth day bash. I turned 20 years old today in 2033 A.D and my friends arranged a get-together. I am almost done with cacophony of noise and music together. I have to rejuvenate myself before attending my college tomorrow. It is a tough practice of time consuming practical sessions at college where we are supposed to be in a lab for two and half hours. That is a killing experience and I feel like being consumed there in the lab. How on earth a person can afford to be in the lab for so long. I feel like withdrawing my admission because of this lab-trauma. I even talked to my parents about it but they don’t want me to lose the opportunity to become science graduate from the college. I have been a brilliant student since my childhood but with minimal sitting time which is an important factor to concentrate upon anything for a longer period of time. I talked about it with my parents and they admitted a mistake which encountered in my formative classes. Back then, an important component of educational legislature was framed with less or no home work and metaphorically, weightless bags at school. We used to take few books at school to shed off the load of the bags and teachers were bound to award us with minimal home work.
We used to have less or no home work at home and that built my mental infrastructure accordingly. With this degree of homework we kept enjoying our childhood without knowing the road to be taken. There was less time for books and more a free time. Mobile phones became our tool to live with but it gradually, took us away from books. Our patience to stay with books dipped with each passing day and we became consistent with the new module. Our parents tell us that they used to stay in the lab for hours without breaking their patience as their routine as students had made them so. They notify that “we had a poor schooling” because only one dimension of our development was taken care of while creating the environment for the new module of teaching-learning process. School Bags were scanned more on the basis of quantity than quality of stuff inside them. Schools were ordained to refrain from home work or minimal work was made mandatory in post-schooling hours which affected our developmental progress as blooming students. Instead of bridging the gap between a school and a home a wall was built to cut-off the learning hours. That is why they say that “we had poor schooling”…… Today’s fiction can become tomorrow’s reality if transitional phase is not planned properly.
Transitional period is more critical and sometimes chaotic if proper care is not taken and can damage the learning fabric of students. Home work helps us in improving our patience, grades and skills. It helps us to stay consistent with our learning process comparatively for longer periods of time which nurtures us in the lap of learning and strengthens analytical skills, discipline and time management. It is a pivotal component of learning and growing process. Horizontal and vertical development of brain is possible only when we are grilled through critical ways to self learn. Problem solving attitude can be developed by doing so. A student becomes self confident when he tries his hands on the numeracy on his own. Teachers make sure that such things are inculcated in the formative years and that becomes possible when students are left free with books but not without the books. Checks and balances are need of an hour but fitting same size to all is run of the mill and inappropriate.
Einstein says,” Everybody is genius but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. Potencies are different and so are ones flaws. But giving same treatment to every flaw is worthless. Schools are responsible for one’s holistic development but to rein them without giving them any substantial replacement/substitute is game over for them. Our education policies need to be revisited but should be multi-dimensional now. Problem solving aptitude, critical thinking, artificial intelligence, coding must be the part and parcel of present day educational process. Ironically, CCS (Computer science) is not part of our state curriculum and we all know the future belongs to digi-tech only. School bags are scanned to make sure that the two – three centuries old content carrying books are carried by our students and there is no roam for CCS or work books which can augment the critical thinking. The interpretation of omens indicates that we are pushing the vehicle of our learning skills into its reverse gear. New education Policy is believed to contain core competencies needed for 21st century; we have kept our fingers crossed and let the content do the talking. Weighing bags, bereaving students from whatever creative and critical stuff they carry and loading them with age old stuff instead, can be detrimental for their future.
NEP is welcome but it will certainly take couple of years or more to get implemented. It still needs to be checked whether it is going to keep its bars high as per the demands of 21st century. So far nothing substantial has been seen, no curriculum is ready for schools to teach. Whatever applied, practical or critical it carries are yet to be seen but bag scanning and keeping students off-radar is a matter of great concern for all – schools as well as parents. Hopefully, getting a compliance with modern educational teaching -learning pedagogies as outlined in NEP can undoubtedly usher-in an era of dramatizing class room ecosystems. The concern that shall see a remedial window with an immediate effect is to set an infrastructure all set to show an absorption capacity of all this novel transition.
Going bag-less is a Utopian concept in a landscape where research and development of teaching faculty and state exchequer for it with direct benefit disbursal in an allocation plan are at complete odds in unison. Set the basics right to engineer a Utopian idea of curriculum which is surely a cultural reflection in 3rd world countries. We accept the change to the extent of a permissible limit where our social cost doesn’t sweep us from responsible civic beings who get hypnotized at every emergent situation. Mental health can be promoted with an umbrella curriculum that is spelt out and written on the wall. Depriving off the students from home work or forcing the schools to keep them aligned with age old stuff can bear no fruits but the need is to filter whatever good they have, enrich their stuff to teach, to work in agreement with demands of present era until the NEP (box) opens.
(The author is presently working as Principal Radiant Public School Anantnag and can be reached upon: [email protected])
