Changing education paradigms

21 Nov 2011 4 Comments

by Yatin in Education Tags: education, ken robinson, rote learning

Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I’m sure we’ve all had our share of learning by memory, vomiting onto exam sheets and forgetting it for good. Even more, we’ve had logic denying experiences at school and college where some things just didn’t make sense.

Back when I was in school, a very senior history teacher explained to me the logic of awarding students one less than full marks even for a perfect answer, just to motivate us to do better. He insisted it made sense. A year after this, he became the principal.

The same year, another very senior geography teacher insisted on giving me a zero for not shading a graph, that represented a single parameter and did not require shading. A few years later, she became the principal of my school as well.

I’m starting to believe there’s a pattern here.

Getting slapped for drinking water without permission, ridiculed for insisting that Bill and William Gates is the same person and losing numerous marks for replacing “key words” with their synonyms in definitions form my share of  sour school memories.

But learning is important isn’t it? And collecting good memories about how and what you learn is equally significant. Knowledge truly is the food of the soul.

On this note, I want to share this amazing video and Sir Ken Robinson’s outlook about the need to change education paradigms. It inspires me every single time I watch it.

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