On education seminars and workshops circuits in India and abroad, the new buzzwords are 21st century, new millennium, and communication and soft skills learning. Even in India, theres been a sudden shift in favour of developing critical thinking, analysis and problem solving skills. In particular, theres a new and welcome awareness that contemporary education requires more than academic proficiency which can also be absorbed in environments far removed from bricks-and-mortar classrooms.With this in mind, the first assignment I set for a recent training programme was for participants to think of one stand-out moment in their journey from school to the present day, a turn-around moment when they discerned, ‘I am good at this! or ‘I am this sort of learner! or ‘Oh, thats why we did that thing at school! My objective was to make them think about the process of learning itself, not merely the outcomes. Some of the responses are worth noting because they say so much about the type of education dispensed in Indias classrooms. ‘I was on an important business trip to the US when I lost my slides. I made the presentation ‘jugaad style in the awareness that if I had confidence in myself, people would have confidence in me. ‘The car broke down on a dark road. I angled my make-up mirror to reflect the only light onto the chassis, to help me change a tyre. It was the first time I realised there was a practical application to what I learned in college. What struck me was that none of these reflective moments happened in a standard classroom on a normal day. Even now for the current generation of young learners in India, a normal school day is mostly about competitive achievement against a narrow set of markers set by others, viz, examinations that act as a barrier to high quality further education. Learning for exams doesnt require any self-awareness, and more crucially, doesnt stimulate the strong creative and adaptive instincts necessary for success in the world beyond school gates. Hence the growing importance of out-of-classroom learning. Getting out of the classroom in essence means getting your nose out of textbooks! But unfortunately the time children spend not studying formally is often seen as educationally less important than the moments when they are working hard, copying and memorising facts and dates for tests. One solution is to combine the two and connect the dots between study and exploration in childrens minds. For instance, if theres a chapter on water pollution in a civics or biology textbook, teachers could take students to a connected institution such as the Sulabh Museum of Toilets in Dwarka, Delhi, where the latter can witness the operations of a biogas plant and learn about the history and evolution of sanitation in different parts of the world. If an appropriate museum is inaccessible or logistics are a problem, there are other ways of getting out of classrooms to acquire on-site education. Take children on a tour of an arboretum, a…
