How about a subject called General Studies in schools?
You must have surely seen that meme where a guy is sad because he says that education taught him “pointless” calculus but didn’t teach him how to do his taxes. Here is a version of it -
Now, whether Mr. Sage Boggs is an actual sage bogged down by the education system or not, his point is worth a thought or two.
My solution for this conundrum is to have a General Studies subject in schools, perhaps from the 5th or 6th year of schooling (as per the Indian system starting from Nursery followed by Lower Kindergarten and Upper Kindergarten, all of which take an year each).
This subject will be free flowing and won’t have a defined syllabus or your regular exams. It will be all about arousing an insatiable curiosity in kids which will serve them well throughout their lives.
Sessions could be on reading a newspaper (online or offline), visits to a bank, a post office, different companies and factories, a railway station, an airport, a bus stand etc. All sessions would be modeled on the Reddit #AMA format wherein kids can ask anything they want to and the teacher can either respond right then and there or give a well thought out answer in the next class. The second type of response would be specifically useful, for the kids would learn that for some questions, answers are not readily available. That kind of meta-knowledge is essential in today’s times when there is a lot of information but we don’t always know if we’re asking the right, deeper questions or not.
Needless to say, the teacher for such a subject would have to be extremely competent. He / She may even require to enlist the help of specialists (inviting a traffic police cop) in the class or other teachers. He / She should have an insatiable thirst for knowledge too and have the ability to transmit the same to the kids.
The exam needs to be open ended too, perhaps an open book type or even a take home assignment.
Finally, how the subject progresses through further years of schooling should be decided by how a particular group of students progress in it rather than some predefined system. Curiosity develops the best when it is not burdened by the “right” way to learn.
So, the next time you wonder how a fan actually works, think of how it could have been had you learnt of it in a certain fun class back in school.
