There are three important critical abilities humanity will have to achieve as we pass through the ages. When I was born, the elderly generation never had the complexities of what I face today. They never had to work under similar pressures. They had time to live systematically and they relaxed. They never had the television, the I-phones, or modern computers. They had more time to find pleasure and be happy. Sometimes I feel that they had a better life and happiness than us.
My generation has undergone severe and changed environment. It is from this changed environment that we need to look forward at the next sixty years. We need to consider how to educate the children and the environment in which they will have to work. If we have a glimpse of that, I think we will be willing to change the teaching method in a tremendous way because our teaching methods, to a large extent, are influenced by how we were taught and how we had learned.
I am not saying that the teaching method has not changed, but what I am trying to say is that the teaching methods should have new goals. And I am trying to visualise what those new goals are. Before I speak on those new goals, I am getting really scared when I examine the modern environment and how people live in it.
The Indian newspapers are filled with stories of sharp reactions such as how the law is struggling to control wrong doings such as fighting, killing, and molestation. These incidents in the environment is shooting up and police and courts are struggling. I don’t think that it is fair to blame the court and the judicial systems including the administrative and political systems of a country. It is the people’s responsibility to live in peace and harmony in the changed environment. But, to what extent are we able to be perfectly balanced and to be in peace?
It is possible to attain a perfectly balanced life in a changed environment with positive goals in modern education. The first challenge is the ability to apply the multiple knowledge. How to play with the knowledge attained? The knowledge is there in the books and in the curriculum for any students. But, to what extent can a student play with it?
To play with knowledge signifies to experiment. And, to what extent can a child experiment? By feeling the huge complex knowledge. All subjects have grown to a high level – the depth of the subjects, the application levels of the concepts, and the interlinking of different concepts under different streams are vast today. In the older day it was there but not discovered. In modern day, every day man is adding more and more. So, it is not memorizing but connecting and applying it is the huge challenge for a student.
It is a must for each student to learn to connect and apply the knowledge because, tomorrow, when he/she grows up, he/she has to work with a complexity of knowledge. If you consider any job, it is no more working on a table with a piece of paper. Instead, man’s thinking ability needs multifold development to think and to decide. So, the education should allow the child a lot more freedom to play or to experiment and to do as he is gaining the complex knowledge. This is one of the goals. And a teacher, a curriculum, and a school should be well-aware of this goal as teaching progresses because it is not teaching from all these complex angles that is important but allowing the child to play with it or to work with it is vital.
The second challenge is the ability to decide. The ability to decide is certainly to work with the hundreds of machines that are around us. That is the skill. And why? Most of the memorising jobs has been taken over by artificial intelligence. And, what will only remain will be creative jobs. Creative jobs can be done by connecting multiple machines with the thinking process and taking a decision and a risk.
Seventy years later, the ability to be in those environments shall be much more than what we see today. We can’t even think what would be the environment then. If we think that the environment 70 years later will be the same environment as of today, then we are not in the right platform. So, what has to be developed is the child’s ability to draw the knowledge he/she is playing with. And, using that knowledge he/she has to work with millions of environmental facilities in order to think and to take critical decisions. This is the second challenge.
The third challenge is in between these two challenges. It is man’s ability to hold onto values and to build relationships. Due to innumerable pressures man loses the ability to be in a harmonious relationship. Schools should definitely work towards helping students develop good relationships based on trust – trust between teachers and children, trust between children, and trust with which they deal with the complexity of knowledge and the machine world.
