Learning New Ways to Educate
[Music]
what i’m going to do
is actually tell you a story uh and it’s
a story that i hope will resonate with
all of you
and possibly it’s a familiar story until
perhaps we
get towards the end so once upon a time
we lived in a world where there were
two major things one was called family
and the family was as you know it they
were adults they were children
and the adults did many things and so
did the children
but one of the things that they did
together was
to get ready and send the children to
school every day
the other thing in this world was
something called a school
what was a school it was usually a
building
it had rooms it had walls and when the
children came to school
they were sorted by age and sent into
different groups
and these groups were called classes for
each class
there was another adult an adult who was
usually called a teacher
and she led the children through the day
in a number of activities usually called
lessons
the children and the teacher used books
each of these groups had a separate book
and they were expected to know what was
inside the book
there was a bell that indicated that you
could now
shift from one book to the next and at
the end of the day
there was another bell that enabled you
to go home
and at the end of some months or end of
the year
the children usually did something
called a test or an exam
and then following that they moved into
the next class
so this is the way the world worked and
over a period of time
across the world many many children and
so
most children were going to this thing
called the school
now as we are listening to the story
this seems like quite an ideal situation
and familiar with all of us but even at
that time
if you looked a little bit closely
particularly a little bit
closely at schools and children in
countries like
india you would see that while
schooling was going very well in terms
of what the children were doing in
school
it was still quite a lot to be done if
you looked at what we call
the annual status of education report
and let’s say you looked in
at one of these groups let’s call it
class 5
even as late as 2018 you could see that
in class 5 there were some children who
were doing very well
almost 50 percent of the children half
the children after five years of school
were able to read quite fluently and do
basic arithmetic
there was a lot of children rest of the
half that were having some difficulty
broadly speaking across india especially
in rural india
even in class five there was about a
little
under 20 percent children were still
struggling with reading
letters uh and small words even in their
own language
it was another 20 percent who were able
to maybe
read a couple of lines but would
struggle if you gave them a big
story and if you looked at math
then imagine a problem like 56-37
there were still half the children after
five years of school
who would struggle to be able to solve a
problem
like that i think people were
increasingly becoming aware that this
was an issue
that schooling was proceeding well but
learning needed some work
and you know whether it was in the
family or whether it was
the school we were all stuck trying to
balance the
needs of these different children and
how do we square it away
with the aspirations that we all had
for individual academic excellence for
these kids
but broadly if we step back the family
felt that its main responsibility was to
send children to school
and then this business of learning would
really be carried out
within the walls of the books within the
walls of the school
and within whatever it is that the
teachers and children did together
and that’s kind of where we were and
then suddenly to this world
came a huge big shock and that shock was
like everything suddenly overnight
changed
the thing that we called school had to
shut immediately
the rooms were shut the doors were shut
the gate was shut and the children were
sent back home
and this went on for a week two weeks
a month two months and now 10 months
later
we are still in a situation where we are
really not sure what’s going to happen
and over this period of time when
everything came to a stand skill
and particularly when the schools shut
it was like a giant grand
tree had fallen and we are not sure when
that tree will get back up again
so what happened after this big shock
hit us
i think to begin with everybody was
still just stunned with the shock
and we didn’t know what to do but slowly
many things began to happen
and if you look closely at a village in
india or perhaps a village or a
community anywhere in the world
you could see that everybody started
doing things in somewhat new ways
inside the family parents began to help
children
and we saw that even in villages in
india
where perhaps parents were not very well
educated they were still
helping their own children out in
different ways
if you looked at what friends and
siblings did friends and siblings did
what they always did
they taught each other what they knew
and they together tried to make the best
of this very strange time what about
teachers
i think teachers were very taken aback
because they really didn’t know how to
work
accepting when they had children in
front of them and
you know now the children weren’t there
so teachers worked out different ways of
reaching children
and the ways of reaching may vary from
the very rich schools
to the much poorer schools but there
were big efforts being made
but how you can reach children and as
school systems
similar efforts were made because
everybody was concerned the time was
ticking
and the thing called school was not
operating and so what would happen to
children
all over the world even within our own
country there were all kinds of people
who were trying to create games
applications
and all kinds of things that could be
sent to children from
remote everybody looked at the resources
they had
and the abilities they had and what is
the best combination of these things
that could be put together to serve the
needs for today
and the more that we did the more that
we discovered we could do
old phones came out of the cupboard
radios were dusted off
suddenly we found that this thing called
education could be done in many
different ways
and the space between the school and the
uh home which perhaps was a little bit
distant and wide
became full of many different people
trying many different things
and i think when we look back one of the
things that we’ll see
when we are able to let the dust settle
is that everyone starting from our
grandmother to the last grandchild
from the first teacher to a very
experienced teacher
everyone learned new ways of doing
things
and so i would say that as we look ahead
and we have to look ahead and our story
has to go
to a new a new chapter
at least for me i can see some green new
shoots beginning to sprout
you may call them shoots new green
shoots of new hope
because i think that as a society
as a national society as a village
community
we have all learned that there are new
ways of doing things
what are these new ways of doing things
if you take a step back
and you look at the key pieces of what
constitute
education we can see that
absolutely the core elements of the who
the where the when the how
the what and perhaps even the why
have undergone some change now in many
indian languages for example in hindi
we have a word called alphavira
alphaviram means a comma
usually when you write you use commas
and you use full stops
and we all now know that this shock that
hit us is not a full stop
it’s like a coma and in that period of a
comma
we have had the time to really
re-imagine
what this thing called education
especially for children
could be like so let’s look if you
imagine the picture that i drew
for you as actually a real picture let’s
imagine
who is doing what i think the who of
education
clearly we can see that in addition to
the teacher who
needs to be a key part of what we do
there are all kinds of other people
who now feel quite competent capable
and perhaps sometimes they’ve been
pushed into this role and sometimes
they’ve taken the role for themselves
whether it is the older sister or the
neighborhood friend
i think everybody sees that they can do
more than they were doing
in terms of helping children learn if
you think about the
where this can happen it’s clear that
this business of learning is happening
not just inside those four walls
but in the courtyard of your house maybe
on top of a tree
it can be happening anywhere really
wherever it’s convenient
when lessons come through your father’s
phone and father only comes home late at
night
then that’s when you take what you you
have in his phone and try to do it
if messages come on your mother’s little
nokia phone then you take the phone from
her when she’s able to share it with you
so really just like the who has really
multiplied
the where and the when can also be done
now in many many different ways
and we all have experiences of doing
that
if you think about the how i think the
how earlier was face to face
it was one-on-one or rather it was in
groups of children
who were dealing with adults i think
that how has also become
a much more mixed situation with
different ways in which people have been
connecting
it is true that for some uh children
there is many methods by which lessons
and learning opportunities are reaching
them
some are on online classes at all times
and others get just a hundred and
you know whatever 60 character sms on
their parents phone
but it’s clear that the old ways in
which the only way you could learn
was being in front of a teacher with a
group of children sitting in rows and
columns
has certainly undergone some change so
the how has changed as well
and i would not be surprised if we are
all doing a lot of rethinking on the
what
what should we learn how should it be
learned and when should
we learn if you think about education
as three broad streams
learning for school for learning to go
further and further in education
then that is one kind of learning and i
call it learning for school
you can think about learning for life
and that’s the kind of thing that we are
all using right now
when resources are limited how do you
make do
when somebody is ill in the family but
you’re not able to take them
to the nearest doctor or to the nearest
hospital then what do you do
when money has finished and yet you have
to survive
what do you do there are many many many
things that i think we
as adults and as children need to learn
about learning for life
and then of course there is learning for
work so perhaps in this alpha v ram
period
we are all in our own different ways
thinking about
all these different kinds of learnings
that we need to be ready for
and also thinking that this individual
academic
excellence mode where we are checked off
during tests or exams to certify that
we’ve learned
really also under needs to undergo quite
a lot of change
so put together i think to me what it
looks like
is that the why we are doing all of this
is already being rethought and like a
green new
shoot a green new shoot of new hope for
education
we need to tend to this carefully when
schools open up again which we hope we
will do
we hope that the schools can open up in
a much stronger way
much stronger way with the support of
all these capabilities and resources
that people in the community have shown
both from the air
in terms of new ways of technology
reaching us
and also new ways from the ground and
therefore i think
that as we get ready to face the future
we have many things we need to do but
i’d like to leave you with three
major pieces one is we need to get ready
to get
back get back not just into what we were
doing before
but get back and pull with us the new
things that we have learned
this is true for a child who’ll enter
standard one this will also be true
for somebody who’s going to sit for
their 12 standard exams not very
far from now the second is that we need
to connect with each other
it has been in this big shock period you
know ways in which we haven’t met our
friends
our teachers and many others in our life
so within school we need time to connect
back to each other
and connect back with all the
experiences that we’ve had
we need to give ourselves time to catch
up catch up on very basic things
as well as catch up on things that we
feel we may have
missed out on in the last year and
finally putting it all together
i think we need to get ready for a
massive leap
forward so i want to leave you
with this idea and i’m so happy that i
was asked to speak about the new hope
because despite the difficulties that
we’ve had in this last one here
i see some very very promising green
shoots
of new hope thank you
you