TEN SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE EDUCATION IN INDIA

Few will be surprised at the news that India ranks very low in global rankings of learning. 

Here is my das paisa on what to do about it. 

In India, the emphasis in education has always been on developing technical manpower at post-secondary levels. Improving quality, access and infrastructure at primary and secondary levels has always had much lower priority, until very recently. These policy priorities of the last 65 years urgently need to be reversed. Here are 10 proposals to do that. 

1. Let the main beneficiaries of technical education, viz., industry, pay for good quality education by investing in universities and IIT's, and vocational institutions. 
2. Let the state enable and subsidize community and private sector participation in primary and secondary education, and let schools and workplaces link up more effectively so that the walls between them are lowered. 
3. Let more teacher training institutes be created by the state and others to raise a generation of educators who model good learning, and who are able to design good SOCIAL learnscapes (see 9 below). 
4. STOP EQUATING EDUCATION WITH SCHOOLING and devise alternative flexible channels for learning, using IT and broadband. 
5. STOP EQUATING ASSESSMENT WITH STANDARDIZED EXAMS, and introduce a wider range of assessments of performance based on authentic understanding. 
6. Develop alternative credentials that post-secondary institutions and employers can recognize, based on the new assessment methodologies. 
7. Restructure schools so that their students can learn to function creatively, compassionately and productively in the real world, not spend their childhood and youth in misery preparing for one test after another. 
8. Assess and reward private sector contribution to education by measurable benchmarks for enhancement of intellectual and social capital, not by RoI or market share alone. 
9. Let the best teachers teach at the primary levels so that by the time learners reach secondary and tertiary levels, they are capable of SOCIAL (Self-Organized Collaboration for InterActive Learning). 
10. Devote the major share of educational resources to developing primary years and secondary learning for an unknown future, not for the past.

WHAT DOES THE ENTRY OF CORPORATIONS INTO THE INDIAN EDUCATION SECTOR MEAN?

The announcement of the entry of Reliance, HDFC, Wipro and other big corporate names into the Indian education sector raises many questions. 


Why is it that we always talk of education as if it were nothing more than schooling and attending universities and writing exams? Schools, even good ones, are usually very badly structured to promote learning for the future. The corporate entry into the education sector will simply exacerbate the problems of education if they only open new schools that do the same things in the same way as the old schools, but only with more impressive cosmetics. Many of the so-called "international" schools in India are good examples of this, because they have been promoted by people who have little understanding of learning, but have plenty of cash to park into what they see as a new marketing opportunity, with IB, IGCSE and other exclusive foreign "brands". Broadening educational access is one of the new strategic emphases in the IB, but what are the Indian IB schools doing to promote this agenda?

Are the corporates going to promote new structures of learning based on contemporary understandings of the learning process? Are they going to provide new and affordable learning opportunities for the masses using the declining costs of IT and broadband? Are they going to make it possible for students who can't go to school to receive a personalized education on demand? Are these students going to be able to acquire a qualification based on performative demonstrations of their understanding? Are these qualifications going to lead to jobs? Will corporate education qualify students to contribute usefully to improving their own communities? I certainly hope so, but all this cannot be the task of the corporate sector alone, but also of community level organizations. The role of the state should be to enable and incentivize the community level organizations and corporates to do what each does well.

It is time to develop performance indicators ("balanced score cards") to measure the contribution of the corporate sector (and indeed all learning service providers) to education not just in terms of RoI and market share, but also in terms of enhancement of social and intellectual capital. We need convincing evidence (not always *measures*) that the schools they support develop a broad range of future oriented skills and dispositions, not only for students, but also for teachers. Here is a partial list: ability to use and interpret data, communicate sensitively with people of different cultures and social backgrounds, conduct scientific and conceptual inquiry supported by analytic reasoning, develop sound arguments, exercise social and emotional intelligence, solve problems creatively, reason soundly on ethical matters, enjoy and create a broad range of aesthetic experiences, reflect usefully and deeply on their learning, engage in activities that challenge them meaningfully, and also improve their respective communities.

Do our employers value these skills and dispositions? Or believe that they also make for a richer and more productive life? Are the corporates interested in moving education towards these kinds of goals? Or is the education sector going to be captured by a drive to maximize market share by fooling parents with money into believing their children are getting a superior education simply because they acquire a foreign diploma?

THE SPONTANEOUS EMERGENCE OF LEARNING

Here is an inspiring example of what children are capable of when they are left alone to figure things out for themselves. Because we know that instrinsic more than extrinsic motivation is really what drives successful and sustained learning, I would have liked to ask Mitra: what motivated the girls who taught themselves genetics in English?  Or for that matter the Italian kids wishing to find out about Pythagoras.

I am also intrigued by Mitra's parting insight: Education is a self-organizing system in which learning is an emergent phenomenon. But as those nifty Games of Life applets demonstrating emergence reveal, self-organization proceeds from particular initial conditions in a system, it doesn't spontaneously self-organize. So what are the conditions that enable and catalyze the self-organization from which learning emerges? Here, I think, are some: the discovery of purpose, a pleasurable sense of engagement, the availability of scaffolding. How could one create a Game of Life model of learning where these conditions are present to varying degrees, and which one can run to see how it self-organizes for learning to emerges from it.

HOW SCHOOLS NEED TO CHANGE...ON THE WAY TO OBSOLESCENCE

Is India at last going to witness an educational sea-change? There is certainly more discussion than before of educational reform at the primary and secondary school levels. Kapil Sibal, the Minister of Human Resources in the current central government, has been engaging in discussions with the public and with experts about his educational reform proposals in primary and secondary schools. Nandan Nilekani and other business luminaries have spoken about the need for improving the quality of our huge human resources. Reflected in all these unprecedented discussions is widespread dissatisfaction with the current system of education. Given that there was hardly any discussion before (say, ten years ago) outside of educational  circles, it is encouraging to witness this awakening. What could possibly be wrong with it?

One reason for this awakening might be that the reforms being considered will affect middle class children and not just those who normally go to state run or state aided schools. The discussions, reflecting middle class and elite concerns, are mostly about the quality of education, understood in terms of making it more 'child-centred', whatever this term is taken to mean). They largely seem to assume that education is synonymous with schooling, that what we need is more schools, equipped with more resources like ICT and richer libraries, and with a 'better' curriculum, delivered by 'better' trained teachers, capable of administering a wider range of instruments than just quizzes and exams to assess the 'performance' of their students. (Each of the words in italics poses questions as to their meaning.) Not enough of the discussion is about the relevance of the curriculum and the assessment to the world that students will live in as adults. Nor is it about educational infrastructure, especially about innovative models that could improve access to those who till now have either had to abandon their education or who have never even started it. The only discussion relating to infrastructure has been whether more schools should be provided through the public sector or the private, and the relative effectiveness of state and private schools.

Too much of the discussion seems to be about reform rather than transformation. Too many of the changes are being conceived simply as improvements to existing arrangements. But what if these arrangements are themselves structurally flawed or inadequate? Then introducing the new reforms may only benefit children who can go to the kinds of schools - and there are just a few in India, relative to the demand for education - which are already open to these "new" educational practices. There are even fewer schools that already have the new resources, standards and practices in place for their teachers, students and parents. But both these kinds of schools - the ones that are ready to change, and the ones that already embody the new standards and practices - are overwhelmingly in the private sector, and therefore endowed with the resources to carry out the changes necessary to ensure that their students by and large fulfill the aspirations of their parents for upward social mobility through professional careers after an education in one of the technical or managerial disciplines. The vast majority of schools in the private sector will very likely  benefit from these reforms only by raising fees, because their promoters will want to recover the additional investment required to implement the reforms speedily enough to cater for most of the students who currently attend them. Deep pockets will matter for the school's promoters if they are to gain a place in the competition among private schools for market share. Deep pockets will also matter for parents as they compete for increasingly scarce places in these schools. As for the public sector schools, one needs to keep an eye on the state's educational budget, and to see how the money is being spent, to make a judgment about the efficacy of the reforms. If past precedent is anything to go by, the reforms are more likely to be slowed down by bureaucratic friction, and the impact is likely to be uneven, depending on the policies of individual states. In states where changes in primary and secondary education have been few and (as in the case of West Bengal) actually regressive, the reforms will probably remain mostly on paper and provide yet another occasion for doling out favours to political favourites in time honoured fashion.

I don't object to the reforms as such, as much as to the assumption that they will fulfill their purpose through the existing modes of delivery of educational services, viz., schools. Unless schools themselves are also transformed, the impact of the reforms is likely to remain limited, and cause confusion and anxiety among teachers, students as well as parents. So what is transformation, why is it needed, and how is it different from reform?

Firstly, I believe that schools are structurally unsuited in their present form for the tasks of preparing today's students for the world they will live in as adults. I have argued this elsewhere in this blog, and will do so again in different ways, so I don't want to repeat the arguments here. Secondly, in the absence of countervailing regulatory or social pressure, schooling in an unequal society often works as a mechanism for reinforcing rather than mitigating existing inequalities. Transformation addresses both the structural inadequacies of schools and those of their social environment, because these inadequacies come in the way of students benefiting from the education that schools are supposed to have provided . If reform means updating the content of the syllabus, allowing more projects and portfolios as part of the assessments, and encouraging teachers to keep updating themselves with changes in pedagogical as well as subject knowledge, and engage regularly in collaborative partnerships rather than work in isolation, then transformation of schools means the re-structuring of time and space in schools to allow for closer contact with the real world outside their walls, the design of increasingly personalized learning experiences in schools, and the development of what John Abbott has called cognitive apprenticeship through new learners collaborating with more experienced learners and experts. Transformation must also enable a wider social diversity of students to have access to schools and other learning opportunities. Moreover, it should also improve the ways universities and employers influence and absorb students leaving schools. In the absence of these transformations, reforms alone will have generated more unfulfilled expectations and resultant frustration for the future.

To conclude, I do believe that curriculums need to reflect the challenges children will experience as adults, together with the way teachers teach, and the way students are judged to be competent for the world they are being prepared for. I also recognize that it is unrealistic to expect that schools will simply be abandoned and replaced entirely with other mechanisms for promoting learning. So I see no harm in the state spending more money on delivering the changes under discussion through the existing mechanisms of schools, with appropriate mechanisms for public auditing at sufficiently localized levels for the beneficiaries (i.e., students and parents) to ensure that the changes are being implemented as planned. This will benefit at least those who are going to school, even if the benefits remain partial and incomplete. The benefits are likely to be more lasting if schools themselves are transformed at the same time, in the manner outlined above. At the same time, I believe there is room for innovating new models for delivery of educational and learning opportunities to those who either do not or cannot go to school. Such models could enable people who are sufficiently motivated to initiate and continue their learning, including those who are currently excluded from schools by virtue of their economic or social status. There is little reason to believe that the children in slums and villages who currently don't go to school will not benefit from alternatives that could enable them to continue their learning through other means, if the current barriers that prevent their reaching these alternative can be overcome. That is why I wish to propose that as much attention needs to be paid to the infrastructure by which education can be delivered as to its quality. Furthermore, this infrastructure should be designed especially to create alternatives to schools, and to provide access to those who wish to continue with their education outside school, whenever and wherever they are able to do so.

Of course, this proposal raises a number of questions: what are these new infrastructural models, who will develop them, and how will they be implemented? I shall try to address these questions in future postings on these blogs.

KEN ROBINSON EXPANDS ON SOME OF HIS MAIN THEMES

Ken Robinson diagnoses the problem accurately, but what do we do about it? Actually, I wish that governments would lighten their control over education, and get out of the way of innovators who wish to move away from the school centred model, and move towards alternatives, including re-structured schools.

I have reached a stage in my life when I have begun to see schools, as they are currently structured, as institutions that have ceased to be relevant to the needs of youngsters growing up in the 21st century. They will either have to exist - because governments and policy makers can't see beyond them - as cultural anachronisms from the industrial age, or under pressure from cultural, institutional and political change, evolve into very different structures, if not cease to exist altogether.

The same goes for the teaching profession. Just as teachers need to become more attuned to the habits of mind and dispositions of expert workers and practitioners directly affecting (and being affected by) the real world, the professions too need to embody a much larger component of teaching or coaching.

The latter is already happening as businesses and other organizations figure out how to acquire, retain and develop their intellectual capital. In other words, schools could become more like workplaces, and workplaces more like schools. The barriers between schools and the rest of society could be lowered or eliminated altogether, so that activities associated with learning and the responsibilities for it are dispersed more widely in society. The role distinctions between workers and teachers, and the conceptual distinctions between work and learning, could dissolve, and the practice of apprenticeship could be reinstated and universalized. Opportunities for personal and communal learning could become more equitably accessible and more differentiated to focus on the needs of the individual and the community. These changes could bring about a truly learning society. This isn’t an original vision (see The Unfinished Revolution by John Abbott and Terry Ryan), but we seem closer to its realization because of the possibilities opened up by web-based technologies. But technological possibilities will not by themselves solve a political problem.

How could the future of learning envisaged here include everyone? How can such new designs for the learnscape be prevented from becoming another mechanism of social exclusion, as schooling already has?

THE DILEMMAS OF THE "PROFESSIONAL" TEACHER

Why are most schools so badly structured for achieving their publicly stated goals? Taking mostly bright, inquisitive, active young children away from the real world for which we are supposed to be preparing them, keeping them locked in rooms in the company of an adult who will drone at them for forty minutes before releasing them to another adult who will do the same...ten times during the day...days punctuated by bells... days that run into a dozen years interrupted only by vacations which are increasingly filled with breathlessly anxious prepping for "success''.

Does this sound like the real world to you?

Not unless the world that we are preparing them for is a prison or a factory governed by a panoptical regime which tracks every waking and sleeping moment of its inmates, and occasionally spews out reports about the condition of the prisoner or the output of the worker.

So it's not a surprise that professionalism in teaching is mostly about compensating for these structural contradictions! According to some books about teaching, we are supposed to be able to engage learners and keep them on task every lesson, document every learning moment, form judgments about their learning as well as ours...while accepting overcrowded or overheated (or underheated) classrooms, administrative procedures for generating mostly useless information, ever-changing government policies, new requirements for testing....all the while mindful of the individuality of each student, and keeping the classroom environment conducive to learning. But this is not how teachers actually teach, although it's perfectly true that good teaching and learning in most schools happen - if and when they do - despite, not because of, the systems and structures that are in place.

Good teachers do spend a great deal of time trying to design engaging and interesting activities with clear objectives before the student. I say "trying to", because the three crucial resources required for good teachers to thrive - time, material resources, and the affirming and supportive companionship of teachers with ideas and passions - are almost always scarce. Most teachers who take their profession seriously are being "professional" to the extent that they are striving to do their best by their students, while ignoring or trying to circumvent or compensate for the constraints and systemic failures that keep them from doing their best. The pressures created by the systemic failures often take their toll on teachers' personal lives in the form of isolation, frustration, cynicism, fatigue and burnout.

A good school is one where teaching with integrity and passion is not a daily struggle against interruptions, delays, failing technology, administrivia, isolation, lack of time and appropriate resources, and students are not usually violent, rude, intransigent, tired, or just having their own difficult times. Such schools are rare enough. But a great school is where the systems, structures and ethos consistently support teachers in giving their best, even if the students are not ideal and the furniture and technology is a bit run down. These are extremely rare.

I don't wish to suggest that all teachers are selfless saints struggling in exploitative schools run by evil heads. Some of us are bone lazy, and would prefer nothing better than to teach from notes and administer tests that have remained the same for the last ten years. There are days when I myself have walked into my classroom without the faintest idea of what I should do with my students (you have to believe me when I say I don't make a habit of this), and sometimes wished that I had these ten year old notes to fall back on. A school that I know with an unassailable reputation as a "successful" school, and one, moreover, to which all parents in this country aspire to send their children, has a good number of such teachers, secure in their comfortable sinecures for decades. Many teachers are self-satisfied, teach the way they have been taught, remain in blissful unawareness of the changes in educational practice, and rely mostly on teachers' folklore and war stories about what makes a successful student or an inspiring lesson. Many teachers make terrible students, and admit as much among themselves half-jokingly. This is because most teachers work within schools and in educational environments that demand a great deal of them by way of managing large class sizes, piles of marking, high pass rates in their exams, but very little by way of artistry in designing good lessons.

To counter such tendencies among teachers, administrators sometimes spend time drawing up long lists of what makes a Good Teacher, in the hope that once they put these lists into a faculty handbook, every teacher will strive to become a Good Teacher. The list then often becomes a device to catch teachers out in their failings, however minute, if it becomes necessary to retrench them. Such administrators rarely have time to visit the classrooms in their schools, and seldom talk to their teachers about teaching and learning, about the best way resources - especially time - could be used to support their work. They don't communicate by example or by empathy, but by fear.

The best teacher (and the best administrator) is one who supports students (and teachers) through conversations, commitments and action. These conversations are judgmental only to the extent that they support the student (and the teacher) in discovering ways of improving their learning performances. But the main attitude behind these conversations is patient optimism, the main commitment is to steady improvement till mastery (often defined by some publicly available standard of performance) is achieved, and the action is mainly of supporting in various ways the efforts of the learner to attain mastery.

Unfortunately, most teachers are under pressure from parents and administrators to raise the scores of their students (the only criterion of success) in standardized exams and tests. Administratively, tests and exams are the most convenient ways of assessing achievement, and exams requiring single responses are much more efficient at measuring achievement than exams requiring evidence of reflective and evaluative thinking. It all depends on what one means by 'achievement'. Pedagogically, exams and tests are among the worst instruments for assessing achievement if the achievement being assessed is in the depth and flexibility of understanding (comprising conceptual grasp, awareness of one's own thinking, and ability to apply in unscripted situations as evidenced in actual performances or artifacts of understanding). How after all would you assess a swimmer's ability to swim? By having him write a test on swimming or by watching him swim in various settings? Why is it any different if one wished to judge a learner's mathematical ability, or understanding of business, or of biological principles or of historical changes? It's different because it's administratively convenient for the highly complex and individualised process of learning to be flattened into a standardized format yielding numerical results as a product that could then be accepted by schools, parents, universities and of course children as representing scholastic achievement. The teacher's role then is to "improve" scholastic achievement as measured by these numerical indices. And when teachers are rewarded professionally by the degree to which they can get their students to show this success, then their commitment to steady and patient improvement in performative and artifactual evidences of understanding is undermined, and the effective teacher becomes the efficient trainer of techniques for achieving exam success.

Teachers need to constantly bear the burden of living and working within this structural contradiction: the burden of struggling to keep alive the kindly light of developing learning and self-awareness both within their students and in themselves; but doing so amidst and despite the encircling gloom of industrial modes of schooling, with their fixed times for absorbing knowledge and skills, their standardized measurements of student achievement in exam scores and the associated traumas of failure, their inability to accommodate individual learning styles and trajectories within the standard curricular molds, and the boredom and self-destructive behaviour induced by their worship of efficiency. The master teacher is the one who has learnt to resolve this contradiction in his/her own context and environment.

BORDER CROSSINGS IN THE GEOGRAPHY OF KNOWLEDGE

Open your TV news channels on any given day, and you would most likely be tempted to turn it off very quickly, especially at the end of a long and tiring day. The world seems irredeemably afflicted by various wars and conflicts, not just between humans, but also between humans and the rest of nature. Yet we seem further away from solutions such as the Millennium Development Goals as we have ever been in our history. Horrible and depressing news seem to draw more media attention (and perhaps even audiences) than news that affirm our sense of well-being, connectedness with others and hope. Ironically, this comes after an entire century of boasting about the benefits of civilization, modernity, rationality and scientific progress.

What, if anything, does this portend for the state of knowledge in the 21st century? And what conclusions should we as educators and parents draw to design a viable world for our children and grandchildren?

These questions could easily be the subject of a UN Conference. But for now, I would like to tentatively outline a few changes that may permit succeeding generations to avoid the narrowness of vision and lack of compassion that characterize our times.


Misguided Specialist Interventions

Current educational systems have fostered disciplinary specialization at the expense of the ability to seek out broader connections between our ideas and their consequences for the ways we act in and on the world. Yet one of the effects of our many contemporary crises has been a growing suspicion of disciplinary expertise. Highly educated economists, political scientists, lawyers, scientists and academics, employed by influential global institutions and generously funded think tanks, have played a significant role in fueling and propelling some of these crises. Yet not only have there been well-publicized disagreements among experts in the same discipline on issues such as global recession or global warming, but it has been more common for each group of experts to propose solutions that ignored the insights of disciplines other than their own than it has been for experts from different disciplines to collaborate towards a solution. The result has been that the problems quickly became worse with each new set of expert interventions.

Take agriculture. The same pattern of misguided specialist intervention that has occurred in this field of knowledge and practice recurs in other areas as well. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, agriculture productivity was sought to be enhanced through agricultural engineering in the same way as industrial productivity, with little regard for ecological and other social effects over the longer term. The consequences have been remarkable short term increases in the productivity of various crops, and the prosperity of some farmers benefiting from the so-called “Green Revolution”. But the long term consequences for soil quality, depletion of water resources and a pandemic of indebtedness and poverty have been nothing short of catastrophic in many countries.

Does this pattern – of creating long term problems by seeking short term solutions – tell us anything about the way our mind works? The human mind seems to be a pattern-detecting machine that has evolved excellent mechanisms for inductive reasoning, but is not very good at deduction on the basis of complicated logical rules. Moreover, we cannot see very far into the future, and most of our long term predictions seem to go wrong, especially when they concern human affairs. Finally, the human mind needs to fragment and simplify the world because it is not designed to grasp the world in its wholeness. Try and imagine a map of Turkey that has a scale of 1 cm = 1 cm. It would be useless as a map, because it would simply be a replica of the territory itself. A more useful map would have a scale of 1 cm = 100 km. But because of the need for fragmenting our representations of the world to understand it, we tend to ignore what is left out of the fragments.

Disciplinary Knowledge and Education

What does all this mean for knowledge, and particularly for education? Are disciplines useless as ways of organizing knowledge? Should we stop teaching the main subjects that we have traditionally taught in schools? The answer to both the last two questions must be a firm negative, but I will try and argue for a curriculum that fosters greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity, and by deploying a geographical metaphor for disciplinary knowledge to argue for closer interactions and integration between different disciplines.

We need disciplines because they represent the historical and evolutionary accumulation of ways of understanding aspects of our world through concepts, theories connecting the concepts, and through the methods of investigation using the lenses provided by the concepts and theories. But because disciplines are necessarily mechanisms of selection, each discipline represents a fragment of reality. Disciplines would be useless if they failed to distinguish different aspects of reality. But by the same token, we need some way of re-integrating the pictures of the world that we create through the lenses of the disciplines.

Furthermore, disciplines include not only the knowledge represented by concepts and theories and data, and the methods and results of investigation, but also the social practices of its community of practitioners, their standards and norms for judging their own work, and the forms in which they express their knowledge. Each discipline thus resembles a country or culture, with its own peculiar ways of generating knowledge, and preserving, modifying and communicating it. The disciplines, like countries, also have their own borders, with neighboring disciplines (e.g., Physics and Chemistry) exhibiting similarities in their “landscape” and “culture”. Already we see the potential for new disciplines created through the reconfiguration of disciplinary borders, such as in fields like Cognitive Science, Business and Management, Cultural Studies, Media and Communication. These are already acknowledged as viable departments by many universities.

If we need to gain more integrated understandings of the world, then I would suggest that we should engage in more disciplinary border crossings. In high schools, courses could be organized according to themes and related projects, drawing in insights and techniques from various disciplines, such as
• Energy Use Patterns in Societies – (Physics, Sociology, Geography, Mathematics) Building a Knowledge Society (Sociology, Mathematics, Philosophy, Social Psychology, History)
• Resolving Conflicts and Building Peace (History, Philosophy, Politics, Anthropology)
• Science, Technology and Social Change (Physics/Chemistry/Biology, Sociology)
• Learning and Teaching in the Work Place (Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology)
• Building Energy-efficient Homes (Art, Physics/Biology/Chemistry, Mathematics)
• Engineering for Theatrical Productions (Art, Physics, Chemistry, Design Technology)

Interdisciplinary Work and Performance

Another way to promote greater interdisciplinarity could be to penetrate the boundaries between schools and the rest of society, especially the workplace. Students could be employed to investigate themes in more practically oriented projects which they would need to demonstrate and justify before disciplinary practitioners from businesses and disciplinary experts from academia. Experts and practitioners could also be invited to talk to students in schools. [Added this just now.]

Interdisciplinary work is not without its problems. Disciplines often differ in their standards of depth and rigor of treatment, with some placing much greater value on proofs and measurable certainty and others being satisfied with fuzzy approximations and heuristic procedures. It is therefore difficult to establish standards of interdisciplinary performance. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary work needs to integrate insights from the various disciplines rather than simply juxtapose them, and in a way that generates new understandings that would not have been available without the deployment of several disciplines. This is a demanding undertaking. Yet there are many good models of interdisciplinary work being done in all levels of school, starting from primary levels. We need to take advantage of them to re-orient our modes of learning and teaching for the 21st century.

KEN ROBINSON ON EDUCATION, CREATIVITY AND THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION

Thanks to Edutopia, here is Ken Robinson again. So much of his ideas resonate with mine, that I couldn't resist putting this up.

DREAMS OF A NEW SCHOOL

This is a first sketch of a proposal for a college with what I believe may be a distinctive founding concept: All courses and activities will be organized so that they are designed to explore and encourage social innovation and transdisciplinarity in the service of four “mission themes”:

• peace-building and conflict-resolution
• social justice
• community-building
• ecological sustainability.

CORE VALUES AND ATTITUDES

Moral: Nonviolence, justice, honesty, reverence for life.
Academic: Reverence for truth, open-mindedness, rationality, rigor, transdisciplinarity,.
Social: Critical respect for differences of culture and tradition; secular stance towards religious practices and traditions; ecological sustainability.

These core values and attitudes define the ideological orientation and idealism of the college.

Education is the process of learning how to act on the world, and on ourselves. But historical experience shows that we need to orient this action in the direction of greater justice and peace within and between human communities, and between human communities and nature, or else human survival and flourishing are imperiled. Therefore educational institutions are needed that foster the capacities for cultivating truth, goodness and beauty, and the wonderful diversity and infinite creativity that characterize our condition.

The college rests on the belief that energized by its ideals, it can be a part of this human search for a better world. It aspires to exemplify the ideal of every person being a teacher and an activist working for a better world in addition to any other professional commitments.

LOCATION

The college will be residential, located in a country yet to be determined, and will attempt to bring together students – mainly of pre-university age (15-19 years) but also older students – from all over the world, but especially from communities and nations that have traditionally seen themselves as being at war or as enemies.

ACADEMIC PROGRAM

The college will offer an “enriched” International Baccalaureate Diploma program where the college will use the curricular framework of the IB Diploma – the IB’s Hexagon model – in a way that enables the mission themes to be explored using the methods, concepts, theories and perspectives of more than one vertex of the Hexagon.

Students may enter the college in years 1 or 4 (as gap year students). The academic program will commence with a required foundation pre-IB year to prepare students for the next two years. It is expected that some students may need a year after the third in which to complete the program as “re-take” candidates for the IB Diploma. Others who may have earned the IB Diploma may wish to stay on for a pre-college gap year, for which external applicants will also be selected. Hence an optional fourth year will also be provided for those who need or desire it.

The college will recognize that different individuals learn at different paces, and bring different degrees of preparation and skills to their learning situations. Indeed, students may, in some cases, and within some limits, choose to stay for as long as they feel it is necessary for them to graduate, without feeling stigmatized for doing so.

Other features of the Academic Program

• All courses will be organized around one or more of the mission themes. They will connect with at least two vertices of the IB Diploma Hexagon to study a mission theme.
• Assessments will include a range of formative and summative instruments, for which detailed feedback will be provided aimed at improving to pre-defined standards.
• Grades will be provided only for final assessments required by the IB diploma.
• Students will not be ranked, nor will prizes be awarded for standardized achievement. However recognition for exceptional and exemplary contributions to the mission themes may be instituted if regarded as appropriate.
• All Extended Essays will need to research a question that reflects a mission theme. World Studies extended essays – involving the transdisciplinary analysis of a global issue in a local context - will be encouraged.
• The CAS program will include (but will not be limited to) activities that provide opportunities to explore a mission theme through experiential learning, and wherever possible will be related to a research activity (extended essay, project or guided coursework).
• The Theory of Knowledge requirement will be met through an exhibition or portfolio of reflective activities and texts (which will include – but not be confined to - the required assessment for the IB diploma - an oral presentation and an essay on a prescribed topic). TOK will also be integrated into all courses and CAS reflections and activities in addition to meeting on its own for discussions on “linking questions” such as those prescribed in the TOK course, but in ways that address one or more of the mission themes.
• ICT will be integrated into all courses, and all members of the college are expected to develop familiarity with the use of web-based instruments for collaboration and communication (Web 2.0).

In time, the college could also offer a career-related education program in collaboration with the IBO, offer shorter summer school courses related to one or more of the mission themes, and function as a gap year college. It could also twin with educational institutions with similar interests to share faculty, facilities and programs.

COMMUNITY BUILDING AND INTERACTION PROGRAM

Apart from requiring of its students service within the school community and interaction with communities outside the school, the college will also have its own program of institutional community interactions that reflect at least two of the five mission themes. This will, among other things, mean that:
• The college will establish a collaborative network of schools in the neighborhood, with teachers of the member schools and those at the college collaborating in professional development, and students at the satellite schools collaborating in various learning projects with the students at the college.
• Faculty and administrative members of the college will contribute in other ways to the community service and interaction programs in addition to their own teaching, pastoral and administrative duties.
• The college will need additional resources to devote to its institutional CAS program.
• The social innovation envisaged in the college mission will be realized in the long term by the college acting as a learning organization, and an engine of knowledge creation by its students and faculty members through its own teaching and research, and through developing applicable models of business, educational, health-related and cultural activities that promote the mission themes.

SCHOOL LIFE

Learning opportunities for both students and faculty will be designed not only in the classroom and laboratory, but also in interaction with the local community. Furthermore, students and faculty will be required to work on the campus on maintenance, cleaning and agricultural and culinary activities, in order to acquire habits of working with their hands, and learn useful skills.

The academic year of the college will be organized into 36 five day cycles to avoid interruptions by holidays and legally mandated closures. Classes will shut down every sixth cycle to enable learning to extend beyond the classroom into the community. Students may devote their time to coursework, projects or exhibitions in the campus or outside, or travel for educational purposes.

Student governance

Students will be expected to play a key part as “beneficial owners” in the governance of the college, under the guidance of faculty and administrators. The idea is to understand the constraints and opportunities of a democratic community through open discussion and respectful dialogue. Despite being temporary residents of the college, with no legal rights and responsibilities of ownership, students will be expected to act with as much respect and responsibility as if they were stewards and trustees of the college. This attitude of trusteeship will extend as much to the natural environment of the college as to its physical property, with special attention to the needs of future generations of students.

DESIGNING THE LEARNSCAPE IN SCHOOLS AND ELSEWHERE

Recently, I had a conversation with a friend in India who lives with his family in a remote village, and refuses to send his two children to school. The conversation turned, as it has often done in the past, to the benefits of schooling (as in sending children to school) versus schooling them at home. This conversation came right in the middle of a few other things that are engaging me at the moment. At school, I am involved in an attempt at improving the national high school program for the type of schools that I work for in Turkey (private schools for mostly wealthy kids many of whom aspire to study abroad, with the choice of the IB diploma to help prepare them for university) by building in more flexibility, student choice and school autonomy. I am also trying to design a new kind of IB school that I hope to start in India or elsewhere if I can convince enough people about the need for such a school. And again, despite my sympathy with my friend's refusal to send his children to school, I caught myself falling into the compulsive error of conceiving of education as synonymous with schooling.

If innovation in education is to occur at all, I believe it's necessary to detach the concept of education permanently from schooling. Or rather, reconceptualize schools as an important vehicle for education, but not the only one. This assumes that children will not be obliged to go to school at all, but only if they wish to for specific purposes. Forcing children to go to school is like forcing people to eat at a restaurant: why can't they just go there to eat with friends when they want to, or to learn a new recipe? Why not cook a good meal at home, or at a friend's?

Once one can conceive of schools as only one of many vehicles for education, one can then go on to conceive of various designs for schools that can support educational objectives. One can also imagine other ways of designing the learning process independently of schools, e.g., through informal or formal learning networks.

In thinking of alternatives to schools, traditional or unconventional, I was searching for a word to express a space for structured learning. I hit first upon learnspace, and then learnscape, only to find in Google that it had already begun to be used by various people. One of them was Jay Cross, whose use of the word came closest to what I had in mind - an "ecological" process (involving collaboration with others and with interaction with the learner's environment) of acquiring the abilities to do things in the real world. This applies not only to little kids learning how to speak, or teaching each other a game, or how to play the guitar or hang out on Facebook. It also applies to more formal educational situations. According to Howard Gardner, it is the "disciplinary expert" whose abilities enable him/her to understand the world, and to apply that understanding flexibly and in an unscripted manner to new and unfamiliar situations and problems. Presumably, the perfection of understanding is an "asymptotic" process of developing successive versions that are more and more accurate versions of reality, or versions that "get it less wrong". But however the process of developing understanding proceeds, it is most accurately conceived as an ecological process.

The big question for me is: how do I apply this conceptualization to my idea of a new school? Perhaps I should write a bit more about my school in my next posting.