Dr Mohd Farooq Kalas
“Continuous re-thinking makes the system live and dynamic”
In ancient civilizations knowledge and wisdom were revered above all else. However, over time, the focus shifted to political power and, in the modern era, to economic interests, where science, technology and politics viz a viz whole knowledge sector is put slave to it. This shift has reduced education to a mere tool for job market success, sidelining its true essence-holistic personal development. The current system prioritizes exam performance and job-oriented skills, fostering shallow understanding and compromising the quality of education. This has led to societal issues like wealth accumulation over value-based progress, divisive politics, and social disparities, creating nepotistic and polarized communities. To address these challenges, we must reorient education from its core-emphasizing humanistic values, cognitive growth, and ethical strength.
The Problem with Modern Education
A sustainable, progressive society requires an education system taking from core philosophical principle to peripheral skills, such an orientation easily grasps peripheries when core is already in hands. Hence core to periphery model need to be developed and practised rather than periphery to core. Such an approach fosters purity of spirit, empathy, cognitive clarity, humane understanding, and courageous action for the greater good. By starting with core values, peripheral skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, or skills for job market and livelihood naturally follow, creating a “genetic” approach to education that ensures meaningful outcomes across economic, political, and social spheres.
Way Forward
1. Developing humanistic instincts and behavior
a. Conditioning ahead of Teaching: we have been in a practice to teach a kid how to read and write starting from alphabets and counts almost completely ignoring the ethical aspects of his personality. Through the subsequent grades we instill the knowledge of the subject matter with a complete orientation of scoring better in the exam. Students are conditioned to think and accept that education means to pass exam and next exam only.When students are pressed to get top scores in the exam, a blind race of ranking first conditions a student to be selfish and greedy.
To achieve real aims of education it demands to first shape the personality in a desired way and teaching of the subject matter should follow it. Just like curriculum and subject matter has been graded upward in accordance with age of students similarly personality shaping and behavior conditioning procedure should also be graded keeping one step ahead of curriculum grades. Content, methods and mechanism of which needs to be designed and implemented in an institutionalized procedure. It is because education is meant for humans, it needs a humanistic pavement to move ahead. In absence of humanist conditioning education turns to be tool in wrong hands. Humanistic instincts and behavior development can be brought about by focusing on developing the sense of justice, responsibility, affection, empathy, equality, human understanding, tolerance and courage for which various methods and activities can be worked upon. Formative assessment rubric for almost overall personality is already proposed in National Education Policy 2020.
b. Modelling Ethical Behaviour: Teachers and staff should exemplify honesty, fairness, and respect in all interactions.
c. Empathy Training: Encourage students to engage with diverse perspectives through active listening and discussions to broaden their understanding.
d. Positive Reinforcement: Reward ethical behaviour to motivate students to act with integrity.
e. Ethical Decision-Making: Use frameworks like the Prosocial Design Process (PDS) to guide students in navigating ethical dilemmas.
f. Reflective Discussions: Create spaces for students to explore values and ethical issues, deepening their commitment to humane principles.
g. Positive Reinforcement: Encouraging ethical behaviour through praise and rewards can motivate students to continue acting ethically.
h. Discussion and Reflection: Creating opportunities for students to discuss ethical issues and reflect on their values can deepen their understanding and commitment to ethical behaviour.
2. Educating Parents
Children often emulate their parents, making family environments critical to educational success. Parent-Teacher Meetings (PTMs) should include mandatory counselling on fostering positive traits. Key strategies include:
a. Modelling kindness, patience, and resilience.
b. Encouraging open communication to build emotional intelligence.
c. Setting clear expectations and boundaries to promote responsibility.
d. Supporting children’s interests to nurture well-rounded personalities.
e. Teaching emotional regulation and empathy through family activities.
g. Help establish socio-cultural attachment to the child: in a racing trend of education children remain mostly away from the home and miss linkages with their relatives, locality and culture, putting the child in an alien atmosphere,severely missing traditional affection, love, care, attachment and social values as well. Help the child to maintain fabric with locality and relations by attending social functions and events and sharing moments of happiness and pain.
Every child is unique, so it’s important to tailor these strategies to fit your child’s individual needs and personality.
3. Teacher empowerment:
Student’s personality cannot be better than his teacher. For the sake of students’ education that develops purity of spirit, humanist emotions, cognitive minds, and daring strength teacher need to be ambassadors of such properties. Training modules need to be well researched and institutionally designed making them ambassadors of such an education. It involves several key parameters:
a. Professional Development: Continuous training and development opportunities help teachers stay updated with the latest educational practices and ethical standards.
b. Trust and Autonomy: Teachers need the trust of their administrators and the autonomy to make decisions in their classrooms. This fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility.
c. Access to Resources: Providing high-quality learning materials and adequate resources ensures that teachers can effectively deliver ethical education.
d. Supportive Leadership: School leaders play a crucial role in empowering teachers by providing support, guidance, and opportunities for collaboration.
e. Ethics Education: Incorporating ethics education into teacher training programs helps teachers navigate and teach complex ethical issues, enhancing their professional practice.
f. Collaborative Environment: Encouraging collaboration among teachers promotes the sharing of best practices and collective problem-solving skills.
g. Uplifting Social Status of Teachers. Social status and perception of teachers is the initial factor impacting students. Several countries have reserved seats in in buses and trains, preferential seating arrangement in offices and public places including courts. Society needs to be conditioned to interact to the teachers with certain respect as a matter of respecting education.These parameters collectively contribute to create an environment where teachers feel empowered to provide ethical and effective education.
h.Avoiding teachers’deputation for non-teaching tasks: teachers are frequently and potentially deputed for non-teaching tasks like, electorate data collection and literature, census and various types of surveys as well as in deputations in non-educational offices.It severely damages the set procedure and framework of education, social status and public perception as well as very professional built-up of teachers. Hence such a practice tends to fail every educational policy in one go.
5. Dynamic Curriculum Development:
A lively curriculum ensures education remains relevant and impactful:
Annual Updates: Replace 10% of the curriculum with the latest knowledge advancements yearly.
Graded personality sophistication measures: On the pattern of academic grades personality sophistication curriculum and tools also need to be developed and graded keeping a step ahead of the academic grades.
Continuous Feedback: Assess curriculum components regularly for effectiveness.
Community Integration: Include students’ local achievements in evaluations to foster social responsibility.
Clear Learning Outcomes: Provide teachers with guidelines for desired impacts per chapter.
Self-Study Components: Dedicate portions of the syllabus to societal and current affairs for independent learning.
Conclusion
Education must transcend its current focus on exams and jobs to nurture individuals who are ethical, empathetic, and courageous. By prioritizing humanistic values, empowering teachers, engaging parents, and keeping curricula dynamic, we can build a society that is humane, just, innovative, harmonious and united. As members of a global community, we must act as missionaries, refining education to shape humans as the most precious resource for an ethically and technologically advanced future.
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