Striving towards a better education system in India

It is high time the education system in India moved from authority-centred, text-oriented classrooms to student-centred, interactive multi-media classrooms. Are we not still following the same teaching methods which had been in use for centuries? 21st centaury students should be well equipped to face relentless challenges which many of us, as students did not face, 15 or 20 years before.

Our education should be fine tuned and our teachers should be trained to focus more on learning by students than teaching by teachers. Come on, teachers, we should have a greater responsibility towards every single student in our classes. Our teaching strategy should be modified to let students develop problem solving strategies and logical thinking skills. In short we must move towards an education system where we engage the students to have a deep learning and not enrage them.

In contrast to deep learning what we see in Indian classrooms and lecture halls is mere surface learning. There is a higher tendency to focus on examinations only and our students, a majority of them forget most of what they had mugged up, after examinations. I have few questions for you to ponder upon:

1. Why do most of our students forget most of the stuff they have learned after their examinations?
2. Why can’t majority of them cannot think on their on and find reasons for why things work or why things don’t work?
3. Why a hefty group of our students can’t really relate to many practical applications of concepts they have formerly learned?
4. Why do we need so many finishing schools to coach our fresh engineers?
5. Why do we have so many fresh professional graduates incompatible to the needs of our industries?

Learning is not like a postman delivering a parcel, neither is it spoon feeding. According to education psychologists the idea that; 'learning is transmission of knowledge from the teacher to a passive student' is an abandoned idea! Learning is even, beyond behaviour, in response to stimuli. Learning is really indeed a much more a intricate process.

Deep Learning involves making sense or abstracting meaning and relating parts of the subject matter to each other and to the real world. It is interpreting and understanding reality in a different way and comprehending the world by reinterpreting knowledge. Deep Learning is defined as examining new facts and ideas critically, and tying them into existing cognitive structures and making numerous links between. Surface learning can be explained as an effort to accept new facts and ideas uncritically and as an attempt to store them as isolated, unconnected, items.

Interactive student-centred classrooms can be implemented using student response systems and efficient questions which trigger student cognitive processes. It is not the technology which drives the result but the effort and dedication every educator puts in to establish a better educated, efficient and technically sound nation.