Understanding Education — a framework

With any topic, I like to start with WHY. Why Education? Whats the objective. I was quite surprised to find that there isnt a clear shared understanding of Why do we need education. So this question — continues to be an area of learning & exploration for me. The intuitive answer I have currently is — if each individual could become the best that they possibly can — the world could be significantly better. Could education play that role? More on this later.

This post is about a simple framework that I’ve found very useful in defining What constitutes education?

Education can be defined to have 5 key aspects:

• Knowledge — Facts. eg. Petrol Car was invented in 1886.
• Concepts — eg. Newton’s laws of motions
• Skills — Driving is a skill, as is touch typing.
• Application — Critical thinking, problem solving, applying multiple concepts & facts to solve a problem.
• Values — Good vs Bad — Honesty, Gender equality, Hard work, etc

The above can also be treated as a descending order of priority for the Indian education system. While I think the focus should be exactly the opposite order.

Currently, A very large amount of focus is on knowledge(read facts) — in classrooms, in textbooks and in assessments. No wonder — the most successful skill to do well in our education system has been mugging. We do learn concepts — but we cover them mostly as facts, and hardly understand them. As a result we have thousands of engineers, but a large number of them dont understand simplest of concepts like Prime numbers (This was a great filtering exercise done by a friend to filter job applicants!)

There is almost no focus on Skills & Application. Schools & universities have introduced projects — but even there, the focus of the project or its assessment is hardly on application.

We do learn some values through the practices in schools, but these are dogmatic, and haven’t been questioned or challenged over the years.

World today:

My belief is that knowledge is fast becoming obsolete. Internet(read Google) has done a fantastic job of making facts available to us at our fingertips.

The same is happening with skills as technology advances. With touch screens & now with voice recognition, touch typing or rapid typing will be skills that will be obsolete. Similarly, Once self driving cars become the norm, driving as a skill will be obsolete.

In my view education should get pivoted & centered around Concepts, Application & Values.

The skill of finding relevant knowledge should be taught alongside basic skills of reading, writing & numbers. Beyond that knowledge should be lazy loaded (acquired when needed). Skills could lead to productive employment of folks — but it does need deeper understanding of the productivity needs of the country deeply.