THE WORLD OF DIRECT EXPERIENCES AND LEARNING BY DOING

In a world of competitive freakiness fraught with the disease of capitalism, face of school education has enormously changed. Here comes the dire need to look into our schooling culture. A system that is slowly but steadily getting degenerated creating apprehensions of loosing out the generations to come into a world of ‘definitions’ instead of ‘applications’.

Since ages exceptional people have been trying hard to formulate a feasible working system of learning against ‘rote-culture’ on the principles of ‘thought provocation’, application, analyzing bend, appreciation, reasoning and practical approach of ‘learning by doing’.

‘Direct experiences and learning by doing’ are the age old alternatives for passive learning approaches being following followed by most of the schools across the nation. All though it’s making its slow and steady headway into some of the schools, the present pace would take decades to make these societies realize its importance. Unless the total existing system is revamped, the facelift will possibly be very slow.

Learning experiences should infuse the objectives of inquisitiveness, expression, reasoning , application , and appreciation. A great number of philosophers in the past have successfully experimented the same. The contribution s of Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindra nath Tagore, and Jiddu Krishna Murthy in this regard are of great scale.

Mahatma Gandhi during his stay in south Africa established Tolstoy farm, Rabindra anth Tagore opened Shanthiniketan –an international school with the philosophy of back to woods, J.K. started Rishi valley schools and Susaku the Japanese educationist commissioned the TOMO school.
These experimentations were holistic in nature and practical in nature with the principles of ‘back to nature' amidst which learning by doing and direct experiences were sincerely incorporated.
A child who appreciates the intensities of nature, a child who experiences anything directly, and a child who dares to experiment and apply them into its practical life by doing is unparallel in its composure, reasoning, expression and performance when put abreast to a child who is persistently injected with the doses of information.
A sudden peep into the nations which are technologically under privileged, socially not augmented, economically backward and commercially exploited would expose the hard realities of the handicapped state of education system.

India in the recent years has evolved itself to be the best sought after nation in the world for its finest brains, no doubt leading to economic resurgence but equally is the resurgence of corruption level. For a nation to make a mark, its not the bright assemblers we need but an army of inventors with a human face. Learning from and through direct experiences and doing combined with the zeal of imparting the socio-cultural values in the process of teaching- learning is the only proxy for us to resurrect ourselves from the tomb of degeneration.

Give the child two options and she would say, “ I would love to play in TOTOCHAN’s TOMO school than sit in Jack’s school and do arithmetic’s”. Hence the mantra of the system must diversify and change from ‘learn and then play to learn while you play’.
High degree of motor and cognitive development of a child(positively) will develop in an environment where she is let loose to reach up to the horizons and to bounce across the zeniths to discover and rediscover. Qualitative upsurge of a child’s thinking capacity to sprout has very less room left between the four walls and to the baritone of teachers.

We have come far off from the essence of ‘real learning’. A conscious effort to manure this unfertile soil of schooling by the think tanks to smell the dire demand of a progressive world ahead, we must adopt adapt to constructive system of deliverance.
In the words of Edward de Bono, “ almost all of what a child learns at school after the age of ten is totally irrelevant to his needs in later life…….. most schools do not teach thinking at all”.

In the past eight years or so, government of India has pumped in thousands of crores of rupees into ‘Sarva shiksha Abhiyaan’ programme , a comprehensive step in promoting primary education. Although its an accorded move, bringing children to the school alone is not education. The real and tougher task ahead is to transfer qualitative learning_ after a million Ifs and Buts we end up giving precedent answer of_ “There is still a lot do”.
Unfortunately the cozy world of globalization, liberalization, industrialization, urbanization and many more “zations” has yielded mechanical lifestyles creating compressed class rooms where children have to sit under a roof (the so called schools in the interior and remote regions of India are devoid of even that) suffocating all through the day for pumping in the “K” word to excel in multiple tests_helplessly and haplessly.

The result of all this is “ a great mess” that we tend to mess up with once these children formally get their degrees. Then we sit in coffee shop and talk about growing corruption, shunning of responsibilities, devaluating moral values and all sorts of contemporary and current drawbacks simultaneously hoping for a certain “visioneering” of a utopian visioneer to give us our breathing afresh again.

The services of the so called trained teachers are used in the preparation of study materials, question banks and hundreds and thousands of model papers. If the same energies of the same folks are invested in researching, in formulating activity oriented methods and in formulating creative approaches, no doubt there will be a sea change in our education system

Scientific temper, spiritual inclination, physical training, communicating abilities, vocational training and socio-cultural values were imbibed in the live4s of children of varied regions at “Tolstoy farm” and shantinikethan, best of the satyagrahis and the sharpest brains walked out of these premier schools of learning. Not a single prescribed book was used but all that’s required to be a successful human being was imparted simply practically.

Henceforth the whole army of educators need to introspect and rethink over the modus operandi of the lifeless schooling jammed with dullness and monotony.

to elevate standards of living with a liberated mind is torebuild the human society with a ocean full od peace and harmony, unlike the present state of affairs of unrest.

"A change is what brings in a deal of change".