Successful management practices are regularly emulated and imbibed by Educational Institutions which are now functioning like corporate houses and like them are employing standardized methods, standardized application with expectation of uniform products. Education however should not be only product oriented and neither should there be any insistence on a uniform output because we do not produce bottled drinks in our institutions !Have our educational institutions become like production houses and the students like products, where all that matter is just the scores and not the overall development ? it is an accepted truth today that students differ as individuals and especially as individual learners. Their styles of learning are different; their backgrounds are different, namely, culture, religion, language. They are different in their intelligence. Despite this, a closer look of education reform reveals that almost all changes mainly focus on mechanism of improvement of test scores only.This surely was not our objective – we started with the aim of all round development, intellectual, social, emotional, physical and spiritual, and to work in three fields – cognitive, psychomotor, and affected domains. However, with an overwhelming insistence on performance in examinations and test scores, we are becoming narrow in our outlook.The overall focus is still on traditional transaction of a curriculum which continues to focus on things we have already discovered, traditional evaluation mechanism, excessive focus on test scores and eventually a greater number of students opting for professional courses, thereby leading to severe competition and consequent breakdown of values which create a lot of stress both for children as well as their parents.As educationists, our focus should primarily be on teaching children to be self-learners learning to find their own way in the ocean of knowledge; to develop in them civic responsibilities and finally give them the confidence to be future life-long learners and for this we must inculcate in them the abilities of independent, critical and divergent thinking. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether this goal of education has somehow been lost in scoring high marks ?
Teaching is a passion, and my experience as a teacher has been beautiful, emotional and fulfilling. Over the years, I’ve watched the student – teacher equation evolve: From Guru, as all-knowing to Guru as friend and equal, as someone who doesn’t always know the best. Today’s teacher and the learner are partners in the process of teaching and learning. We inspire, motivate and learn from each other; if I don’t know, I can admit it to my students. The teacher is only a facilitator; one who will help the student grow, become a self-learner. The teacher is only one of many sources. Not infrequently, there is a role reversal. With children being so tech-savy, often I am the student and they are my teachers. Has teaching changes the way I think ? Yes, most certainly. My students have shown me how to manage time. I marvel at how deftly they juggle sports, academics, dance, and theatre, for instance. I have learnt how to accept failure as I see my students taking success and failure with equan...
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