Education View

Recently I received this link shared by a friend http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/02/17/business/global/Teach-slideshow.html


Interesting articles, clearly a different way ot teaching and learning. However having been educated in India and Canada and now teaching in Canada, I have also been in close contact with friends and family whose children go to public schools in the US as well. I would not ' throw the baby out with the bath water'. The Indian system of education is definitely changing but once again for those who can afford it. And that is the story everywhere. The rich get the resouces, the poor cannot even afford a midday meal to get them through the school day.

Make no mistake, there are huge gaps in the education system here as well that are rarely highlighted in media around the world. The feel good stories are always from private schools and elite populations.

Books have been written and films have been made about the disparity of access within the same country. The Freedom Writers Diaries and Waiting for Superman have been instrumental in highlighting these issues of access or lack thereof.

http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/synopsis

http://www.freedomwritersfoundation.org/site/c.kqIXL2PFJtH/b.2335915/k.D66F/The_Book.htm

These two websites and many others are worth a closer look to inform ourselves that the 'Us-Them' divide is alive and well.

Illiteracy is high in spite of free public education , math concepts and numeracy skills are not much to write home about. And the most dismal part is that excuses are made as if to say that ' marginalised communities ( read visible minorities) and newcomers ( read new immigrants) are to blame for this. Up close, I can see that even in self identified native English speakers ( read third and fourth generation Canadian) communuties do not necessarily use algebraic terminology and science terms at the dinner table. There is a huge population of elementary teachers who do not always have degress in math, science or English. Speaking English as a first language alone does not allow me to be an expert English teacher ( iambic pentameter, what's that??) Similarly being able to add grocery costs in my head does not allow me to teach algebra to grade 8 students in prep for high school. High schools require their specialist teachers to have a specialisation in those very subjects that they teach; they surely get regular shocks in term 1 of high school when their new grade 9s come to them with a wide range of abilities in math, science and technicalities of reading and writing in English. In elementary schools, the only subjects that are mandated to be taught by specialists are French and Music. Everything else is chalta-hai !

Therefore it is safe to say while teaching and learning has to become more inclusive and engaging for students, a little bit of rote learning and the old ways of pre-teaching vocabulary as well as hiring and training specialist teachers to teach specialist subjects in higher grades of elementary school ( perhaps grade 4 onwards?) are some factors, clearly the way forward. In addition, inviting parents and guardians to participate in the education of their children on a ongoing collaborative platform rather than bracketing them as ' Those parents just want test scores and marks. They never look at the big picture'. Perhaps 'those parents' have understood that the factors that still keeps them in the survival job market and handling multiple jobs sometimes are the ones that their children have to overcome if they have to move forward and take their rightful place in society. No one has the right to say to students (with impressionable minds) that their parents are wrong to expect more from them. This creates a rift in fragile relationships when parents ( whether due to the generation gap or due to being born or educated in another country) are made to feel inferior and pushy for wanting something better for their children. As I had asked my professor while doing my B.Ed in Canada: " Had I not had an A average would your selection committee have touched my application package with a 10 foot pole even? How then can anyone scoff at ' us' who work towards the marks that make or break lives?"

Socio-economic conditions are the critical factor that make or break an education system as well as the dignity of the student. A country that uses education to create a sub-class (whether obedient subjects /a clerical cadre in the colonial context or blue collar workers out of an immigrant population) will not make a quantum leap ahead: after all the system is driven by that very idealogy. Only when a few committed individuals work to take such experiements forward can we safely say that change comes and it is refreshing.