Long Time No See.
Hey blog, its been long since we touched base.
I have been meaning to tell you a lot of things but somehow could not take out enough time.
Ok let me start with my all time favorite topic : Education and Learning.
I have been thinking about a new way to assess children in school.
Now I cannot exactly find the reason as to why children should be assessed. But I also do not see a big reason for why they should not be assessed. Now assuming that they must be assessed I feel they should be assessed with reference to their past rather with reference to others. Learning is basically a progressive development of self. It follows that different people follow different routes to learning and at a different pace as well. Both of these depend on a large number of factors. Foremost among them being the kind of upbringing they receive at home at the hands of their parents. This in turn depends on the culture that their families come from, their educational background, their financial statuses, their exposure levels, their attitudes to social existence, the size of their families etc etc. Now since each child has a very different set of inputs that they receive it is only obvious that their learning paths need not be similar. This is especially true in a country like India, which is a melange par excellence of different cultures, financial statuses, exposure levels etc.
In one classroom in a typical Indian school, one may find children from Business families, from professional or scientific families etc and with a widely variant financial status.
It makes no sense then to assess children against other children who do not have the same platform to start from.
So an assessment of skills always with reference to the child's own past rather than the knowledge levels of other children makes much more sense.
To just cite an example, if there is a particular skill, say articulation or comprehension in a particular language, then the criteria for assessment should purely be the progress that that the child has made with reference to some past assessment. In that case even if children want to be competitive with respect to the resulting scores it makes much more sense. I really would not mind children getting competitive with scores they obtain this way.
Sports teach you a lot about life, if you have the eye of a learner that is.
This particular idea came to me while engaging in sports activities. I found people evaluating themselves by comparing with people who had major advantages or prior training in sports, which I found really ludicrous.
Ok enough said about assessment, now let me tell you dear blog about what I think of the idea of learning.
Learning to me is one of Man's basic instincts. Going through school is difficult, not because one has to learn too much, it is precisely the opposite. It is difficult because the learning instinct is suppressed very effectively, in children.
I have found that when people genuinely learn something and want to learn it more, the feeling is very similar to a basic instinct being satisfied, like food, or procreation. People literally get addicted to learning.And hence a person who is constantly on the learn, is bound to be a very satisfied person. Probably more than a person who earns a lot of money but isn't learning much new on a daily basis.
