Key Concepts

• “How do you teach children the skills for the (future) since we don’t know which skills will be needed then” – Paul Doolan.
  “You need to make them learn from how others had successfully learnt in the past. As the ancient proverb goes – “He who doesn’t have (knowledge of the)
  past, has no future”.
• Children are inherently curious and creative, characteristics that education must encourage. Teaching should be more through storytelling as was in the past. This helps children better understand and retain the lessons. If as the adage goes, the ‘Child is the father of the Man’ he will become, then ensuring the right education with the right values for the child, especially from the age of two upto the age of twelve is most important. Programmes such as the Waterford Upstart, can be considered for even home-learning at preschool stage. Programmes like UPSTART for Pre-school children promoted by Claudia Miner can even be taken up at Home and need only little time. It may be noted that the child’s brains neuron connections are at 100 percent upto the age of two, reducing to 50 percent upto the age of seven and then reducing further to above 25 percent thereafter. Hence we should encourage the learning of languages and even other concepts to take advantage of such greater ability upto the age of seven years.
• Education must teach how to do something or make something, instead of being all about memorizing facts and passing tests. This should begin right from Play School level with unstructured play emphasizing learning by doing and to develop the attitude and ability to persist with what one is doing till it is done.
• Children should also, be encouraged to learn by observing and copying their parents in many traditional skills, such as handicraft, weaving, carpet making, farming etc. If they are prevented from doing so out of an erroneous understanding of what constitutes child learning special skills, with what child labour is, the next generations will soon lose touch with their family skills and such skills will soon disappear with the older generations.
• Education psychology researchers at Purdue University have determined that good science education at the earliest is supremely important and have developed an approach to teaching science in Kindergarten integrating it with language. The combination delights the children and appeals to the teachers. (See www.purduescientificliteraryproject.org). Learning different languages by speaking during play is the best way to become multilingual, it also, helps cognitive development.
• To ensure and encourage the implementation of the right to education, it is not only that more and quality schools need to be setup, but also, that teachers be made accountable through a system of monitoring, recognition, awards and merit pay, and also, that the students be incentivized by the mid day meals scheme and given a choice of schools vide a voucher system that forces schools especially Government schools, to compete to be better. In order to ensure rapid growth in the infrastructure for education the Government should declare schools as a priority sector endeavour, and encourage private participation allowing for a reasonable profit thereon to be determined by the market based on competition. Government or ‘not for profit’ / Charity run schools can provide the competition.

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