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?

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.

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.

ANOTHER SCHOOL IS POSSIBLE?

The long interval since my last post on this blog has not been entirely idle and unproductive in thinking about learning and schools.

For one thing, I have been thinking about starting my own school. Coincidentally, I have been contacted by a number of my former students from my earliest years in teaching, asking whether I would be interested in starting their version of school. I have also resumed contact with a former teacher of my younger son, who had a similar venture in mind. Again coincidentally, a very old friend who is bringing up his own children on an ashram that he and his wife built up from scratch the hard way in a rather isolated part of Tamil Nadu, suddenly resumed contact with me after years. Now he is a firm believer in keeping children away from schools.

So here - in bare outline, to be fleshed out with further details in a longer conversation with friendly critics and critical friends - are my initial proposals.

As I have already noted in my first posting on this blog, we human beings are naturally disposed to learn, but the institutions we have designed to promote learning fail their primary purpose of growing human beings capable of responding to and shaping their world in wise and happy ways. (A more cynical view is that they fulfill the purpose of their design admirably, by churning out generations of compliant conformists with impressive academic qualifications based on tests and exams that have little to do with the capacity to function productively and humanely in the real world. The fact that many of us seem to survive our experiences of school, and turn moreover into active, productive, compassionate and ethical individuals is probably evidence of the plasticity of our minds, somewhat akin to the plasticity of the brain that sometimes enables it to make up for the loss of functionality in certain areas. Of course, it is a conceit of teachers that education and schooling alone shape what we do with our lives. Thank goodness there are other wholesome influences - often within schools themselves - that seem to compensate for the humiliation, bullying, violence, authoritarianism and fear pervasive in too many schools.)

Following from this, one possible response is to abandon the idea of schools and seek a de-schooling of society. Another is to re-fashion schools so that they become capable of nurturing people who will be disposed to use their minds and bodies for wise ends, who will be capable of contributing to survival, growth and conviviality of the community. Not that schools will by themselves solve all social, political and economic problems. But they could act as seedbeds of a culture that is more peaceful rather than violent and conflict-ridden, nurturing rather than destructive, and more inclined to treat other humans with dignity and respect. They could also lay more emphasis on understanding and on the creation of knowledge rather than on simply storing and repeating knowledge.

The school of my conception will be a learning space where students as well as teachers will be encouraged to develop the innate human proclivity to learn, within themselves as well as in others. Every aspect of the school - from the teachers and other associates, through the architectural and organizational design, to the material resources and the technologies - will need to reflect an enthusiastic culture and ethos of learning.

The curriculum will be centred around developing skills for learning throughout life, but especially learning to survive in a world whose survival itself is threatened. The kinds of knowledge that will be valued will be aimed at sustaining and enjoying life. Specifically, this would mean that the curriculum would include:

a) The sciences – both human and natural – as well as mathematics, through deploying them in permaculture projects and building communities of concern and action.

b) Learning the sciences and arts of restoring land and water, growing, making and selling food, building homes and living spaces that are ecologically sensible and aesthetically pleasing.

c) Both social and scientific technologies, but with opportunities for questioning and evaluating technologies, not just against technical criteria but also against moral and social ones.

d) An emphasis on the arts, dance, drama and literature so that students find opportunities to develop an understanding of what it means to be human and creative, and to lead a rich, meaningful and moral life.

However, because of the increasing speed at which knowledge becomes obsolete, the emphasis of the curriculum will also be on developing skills of understanding and inquiry through dealing as far as possible with the real world, rather than the mere acquisition and reproduction of disjointed pieces of knowledge. Students will be expected to identify and solve problems (and recognizing the limitations or the impossibility of solutions).

I also want it to be a space where youngsters learn to live with difference, and will make special efforts to include children from all social classes and castes, and specifically from all countries of South Asia.

It will eventually have the IB Diploma program or the IB vocational certificate program as a graduating qualification for those seeking it, but the basic curriculum design throughout the entire school will be based on the six interdisciplinary themes of the IB Primary Years Program:

1. Who we are: An inquiry into the nature of the self; beliefs and values; personal, physical, mental, social and spiritual health; human relationships including families, friends, communities, and cultures; rights and responsibilities; what it means to be human.
2. Where we are in place and time: An inquiry into orientation in place and time; personal histories; homes and journeys; the discoveries, explorations and migrations of humankind; the relationships between and the interconnectedness of individuals and civilizations, from local and global perspectives.
3. How we express ourselves: An inquiry into the ways in which we discover and express ideas, feelings, nature, culture, beliefs and values; the ways in which we reflect on, extend and enjoy our creativity; our appreciation of the aesthetic.
4. How the world works: An inquiry into the natural world and its laws; the interaction between the natural world (physical and biological) and human societies; how humans use their understanding of scientific principles; the impact of scientific and technological advances on society and on the environment.
5. How we organize ourselves: An inquiry into the interconnectedness of human-made systems and communities; the structure and function of organizations; societal decision-making; economic activities and their impact on humankind and the environment.
6. Sharing the planet: An inquiry into rights and responsibilities in the struggle to share finite resources with other people and with other living things; communities and the relationships within and between them; access to equal opportunities; peace and conflict resolution.

The curriculum will be designed to provide opportunities for students to explore the relationships between these themes as they discover the world around them. The range of experiences provided for such explorations will be as wide as the resources will allow without compromising the physical and psychological security of the child.

Wherever possible, teachers would be drawn from practising professionals and practitioners, including of course professional teachers. But the teachers themselves would need to undergo considerable re-education before they start interacting regularly with students. This initial re-orientation will need to be refreshed from time to time with collaborative activities and workshops where the teachers will be invited to reflect on their practices in a theoretically informed manner, and seek improvements in their practices.

In subsequent posts, I would like to present and develop some ideas about the structural and organizational features of the school.

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.