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