By: Sunaina Gera, Head CSR activities, Gera Developments driving The Gera School project in Goa and CEO, Gridlines
In an era gone by, the focus was on academics and academics only. We
were brought up to believe that pursuing a career in sports wasn't possible
because in a country like India it was an unrealistic option. Parents only
wanted their children to focus on their studies and sports were incidental.
Even those who excelled in sports had limited options as the money wasn’t
enough to sustain a family and the future seemed bleak and the only ones who
actually pursued a sporting career if at all were the ones who knew they were
backed by wealthy families or those who were willing came from extremely poor
backgrounds and figured they anyways had nothing to lose. So with this as the
background academics became the end and be all.
The next issue that crept in was how academics was taught in our
schools. Academics at a point and time when the international boards had not
been introduced into the Indian system and with only the local boards which
were taught purely by rote, the situation was bleak. In such a scenario when
the focus is only on academics and nothing else, then the quality of learning
in our children is going to be affected. We needed a wave of education, a new
breed, some fire, some energy. The current mode and method and had made the
system lethargic and boring. Soon a new method was introduced, however only a
few schools adapted to it, atleast in India. The reason being that the new
system needed work. It requires a skill set not all educators possesed sadly in
our current education system.
Once we identify what life skills we wish to incorporate in our
lesson plans, the educators set about the task of doing so over a period of
couple of months. What makes this method of education so challenging and
interesting for the child is that it is no longer done by rote and is not
textbook oriented. It has to be created by an educator lesson by lesson.
Learning is all-experiential and the child is always challenged. So lets take
empathy as a life skill and we start say from pre nursery. How do we teach a 3
year old to show empathy? This would obviously be different from how we should teach
a 7 year and so on and so forth. However the life skill we choose continues,
it's the methodology which stays.
And this is how we make the break from the archaic mould and mind
set of academic proficiency as the ultimate peak and epitome of learning vs an
all round learning. We need to give the child an all round development rather than
focus on an only a scores based education. Our system needs change.