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?

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?

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.

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.

DOES EDUCATION KILL CREATIVITY?

An entertaining but serious and moving talk by Sir Ken Robinson

No, true education doesn't kill creativity, but nurtures it. Besides, we are ordinarily creative. Some of us may be extra-ordinarily creative.

But what officially and usually passes for education most often suppresses the natural creativity that is inherent in human beings, and nurtures conformity and risk-aversion instead. This is why it's difficult to be creative or original in most schools. You are not only not expected to be creative, but are often punished for being so. Remember that schools as we know them now evolved from schools designed to turn out docile and therefore safe and trouble-free workers for the growing capitalist economy.

Although the capitalist economy now increasingly demands a labour force that is trained to harness the inherent creativity of the human mind, our schools are still stuck with psychometric multiple choice testing for assessing the quality of learning. This is almost like using a ruler to measure the temperature of a lake.

The processes of real education are not inherently measurable. But real education can produce results that are.

WHY THIS BLOG?

The purpose of this blog is to record my reflections on alternatives to schools as currently constituted. These are premised on my realization - acquired through being a teacher for almost twenty years in "good" private schools - that most schools are badly designed for the purposes which they claim for themselves. I would like to reflect on whether society could create more active, concerned and productive citizens for democracies through better schools, or whether we need schools at all. Are schools the best way to create good learner-citizens? Are they the only way? My purpose is not only to look for and think about better design for schools, but better designs for the learning process itself, whether in school or outside.

As human beings, we have evolved to be active learners. Why then does so much of our learning in schools induce so much passivity? What can I as a teacher do to promote active, responsible and reflective nourishment of curiosity and of learning rather than passivity? What can I as an adult do more to encourage learning by the younger generation? How can I foster my own continuous learning?

Just as I am convinced about the need for promoting learning in society through other instruments than schools, I am almost equally convinced that at least in a transitional phase, we would need schools, but with better structures more suited to their purposes for preparing students to learn, and to learn to sustain learning throughout life. Until we reach a stage where society itself becomes a vast school (in fact, in some senses, it already is, or can't help being if only to survive into the future), I don't think we can abolish schools altogether. Schools as we conceive them now might morph into learning spaces or learning networks, but society will always need some arrangement for the deliberate attention to the learning process itself.

Part of my growing conviction that schools as we know them are obsolescent stems from the possibilities offered by new digital information and communication technologies for social networking. Myspace, Facebook, Orkut, Quechup and other web-based technologies of social networking have opened up possibilities for creating learning communities on-line. Second Life - a rapidly expanding virtual world created by its "citizens" - is an example of an on-line community, but I would like to imagine an educational analog of Second Life, or explore the educational potential of such communities.

Notice that I am here speaking of education as almost synonymous with learning. But of course education encompasses more than just a cognitive process. There are political, ideological and moral dimensions in education that are ignored if one focuses solely on the processes of cognition in learning. Indeed I don't see how we can conceive of learning as a social process in isolation from these other dimensions.

On a lighter note, here is a look back from a digital age at the marvel of technology that we now call the book.