The following listing presents a broad appraisal of the current state of school education system:
- The cost of education has spiraled way beyond tuition fees. In fact, school fees are often only around 20-25% of the total cost of education to parents. Are schools reduced to being fringe players in the ‘business of schooling’? If yes, will they really have a case for long? Or they are ‘institutionalised extended homes’ or ‘long duration pre-finishing schools’? Schools are quite lost on the road.
- Schools are too regimented to be able to register and build on the critical differences in the educational context of students, such as their preferred learning styles, parental attention and resources at home, parental education background, reading environment at home, social and religious context, and personal aspirations. As a result, the education system is too generic/broad and it is very easy for students to fall ‘out of sight’.
- Schools were created to support factories but they have themselves become factories with the crucial difference that while the industry has moved on with new practices such as six sigma (one defective product in a million) or total quality control so as to reduce the number of defectives to the minimum, schools continue to check for the quality at the end of 14 years! Quite a criminal waste of precious human lives!
- Do we realise that, on average, schools are as clueless as parents about how children learn? The world is yet to really figure out how children learn. We merely know that under certain conditions, learning outcomes are better. Thus, the good news is that we parents can get to understand education as much as teachers, if we care to learn for the sake of our children. It may also be added with all the modesty at hand that many of us, parents, will certainly never be short in understanding all about education compared to teachers and school leaders; parenthood is in itself half an opportunity to know all about education.
- We do not see one reason for the ever-growing band of tutors and test-prep courses, enrichment programmes, and the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to it. Think about why do you live with this frenzy? How do schools complement your goals about your child’s education? What are your goals for your child? The critical issue is that we don’t really think enough about our children’s education and schools thrive on this state of confusion.
- School education is built on the conviction that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of great value in some moral or metaphysical sense too. They are not; academic achievement is just the beginning of institutional education.
- Schools chase children who are welcomed by all schools but these children may not be necessarily as wanted by their peers in the classrooms, play-grounds or project groups. What do you think of it? It is a serious dilemma but schools have made a virtue of it too – parents fall prey to such educationally inappropriate practices!
- Have you ever wondered who the schools are meant for – students, parents, teachers, principals, trustees/administrators, alumni? Professionally involved with schools, we again and again get the message that schools are meant for teachers (and principals and management)! Government schools, without doubt, and private schools to a significant degree, by default if not by design, are too teacher-centric; school processes are designed to primarily suit the convenience of the teachers! Maximisation of students’ learning gains and living up to parents’ trust are simply desirable goals. In fact, one of the debates on RTE expanded it as ‘Right to Employment’ (of teachers)! Incidentally, even the RTE, supposedly for the welfare of the children, mandates no accountability on teachers and it is toothless against private tuition by the school teachers.
Globally, teachers’ unions dictate key educational reforms! - Schools have not developed effective forward linkages – to higher education and vocational education. Schools do not involve their teachers in career exams preparation or routine higher education qualifiers such as SAT, TOEFL, etc. Schools cannot even prepare students for merit scholarship award exams, such as NTSE. All such preparatory efforts are outsourced as children seek supplementary inputs on their own.
- Most of the issues discussed in this section are true for schools across the globe! School education system is greatly stressed and educational reforms are at the centre-stage of elections in the UK, the USA, Australia and several other countries. In fact, the USA promulgated a federal act in 2003 (quite an exception in the USA’s federal structure where education is a state subject) and President Obama has made it a habit to compare students in the USA, China and India.
To summarise, schools are stuck in the intellectual, social, cultural, knowledge, process and technological contexts of their origin. Educated parents hold the key to educational transformation.
This reminds us of a famous statement by John Dewey, considered father of modern education, in which he enunciated that every child deserves the same education that an educated parent will ensure for his children. Indeed, the next educational revolution will be student-centred with home as the primary axis. We must also add that the conception of student-centric approach in school education is nearly a century old and all the leading educational thinkers of the 20th century extensively experimented and promoted it. However, the change could not go beyond the experimental schools.
Pertinently, as we see it, over the past century the enabling technology for student-centric approach was missing. The technological pre-requisite for student centricity in education are:
- personalisation of teaching and learning processes and resources at the level of every child and
- seamless access of the processes and resources at school as well as home for every child
The twin pre-requisites cannot ever be realised except through the creation of a world-class virtual school with most extensive processes and resources for the ‘new-age pedagogy’. Schools, or chain of schools, cannot be expected to create the next-generation, showcase, knowledge society virtual schools. By the way, over the past decade a few models of next-generation knowledge society virtual schools have matured to a level and waiting in the wings for large-scale adoption of student-centric school education. The ‘GOOD school’ is one such model of student-centric school education system.
