THAT CHILDREN are the future of the nation and that basic school education is the foundation on which the intellectual capital of any any nation rests are truisms about which there seem to be no disputes. The consensuses however, stop with that. Scratch the surface just a little and a plethora of issues crop up that are fraught with on going and deep-seated disagreement. These issues range from the meaning of education itself through issues related to the content of education and the technology of its delivery to issue concerning assessment and learning atmosphere.

Often, critiques of extant educational systems address one or more of these issues in isolation, with participants in the polemic talking past each other than engaging in a dialogue aimed at mutual enrichment and understanding. Here, we purpose a broad framework within which the tricky issues related to school education can be paused and discussed. This framework involves the following three steps, which is outlined in greater detail in the following paragraphs.

One would find that to some, education is not so much the implantation of knowledge as the creation of a facility for learning, the creation of not learned but learning people. According to Ayn Rand, education is essentially conceptual and its aim is to equip the student with the ability to acquire knowledge by his/her own effort. At the other end of the spectrum, there are many who view the purpose of education as the maximisation of knowledge and skills. While on the one hand some of the most brilliant and idealistic minds have made explicit prescriptions concerning what education should be, there is another meaning that contemptory soceity and its institutions assign to education - a meaning that is implicit.

In the final analysis, the meanings that are ascribed to words actually emanate from beliefs and this is true in the case of education too. There is no right or wrong answer to the question, "What is education?" There are only divergent beliefs. The question arises where it is possible to classify the myriad approaches to education in a logical manner, which would assist one in the choice of an effective approach to basic education. It is indeed possible if we can unearth a basic dimension along which approaches to education. We propose a continuum ranging from "context-based" to "a contextual" to different approaches to education. Most extend approaches would fall between these two extremes and would be context-based or a-contextual at smaller or greater degree.

The context based approach is typified by the school-to-work (STW), the approach that has gained currency in the U.S.recently. Proponents of this approach argue that education must be relevent to the real world, the world of work, and should be positioned in the context of the demands made by this world. At the other extreme, the a-contextual approach to education is on the development of values that would make students better human beings. Emphasis is also placed on unlocking the hidden potential in every human being for discovery and knowledge creation.

What Sir C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer once said perhaps illustrates this approach quite well: "My old mother is illiterate but knows the scriptures and their meanings by heart. I call her highly educated but illiterate". In reforming basic education, the first and most difficult choice to make concerns positioning a course of study along this continuum. This is a question that has ideological overtones and impinges upon the interests of several stakeholders- students, parents, teachers, institutions and Governments. The challenge is to find a common ground and choose a strategic posture that best meets stakeholder expectations and values. Having chosen a broad strategic posture next step to give concrete shape to this basic posture by designing the educational content in such a way as to achieve a blend of context-free and context based elements that best matches the basic strategic posture.

Too strong a bias towards preparing students for jobs would produce students who are literate but uneducated. Tilting towards the other extreme would result in schools turning out highly educated and insightful but illiterate persons who would find it difficult to find their feet in the world of work. Achieving this right blend of context-free and context-based elements requires examination of the following issues:

(1) What knowledge and cognitive skills are demanded by the world of work, which we need to incorporate in our curriculum? (2) What are the psychomotor skills that are demanded by the world of work, which we need to incorporated our curriculum? (3) What are the affective (attitudinal) components that are important in the context of the world of work, which we need to incorporate in our curriculum? (4) What knowledge (conceptual and practical), experience and values are of intrinsic and life-long importance far beyond the world of work? Which we need to incorporate in our curriculum?

The implementation of the strategic posture that balances context-based and a contextual learning requires design of aligned delivery mechanisms, besides appropriate context. Indeed, where the concern is about the student "learning to learn", process overrides content as the vital enabler- how the student is learning decides whether h/she learns how to learn rather than what h/she is learning. With the advent of computers and the Internet, attention has now come to be focussed on the use of information and communication technology in education.

So much so that the term "educational technology" has come to be widely (miss) used to mean "technology in education". We however use the term to denote the tools that are employed to accomplish the educational objective. True, advances in ICT need to be fully exploited but educational technology involves much more than cables hardware and software. It requires strategic teaching - the choice of educational tools that fit the educational objective and the individual student. Delivering the right blend of context based and a-contextual elements requires the right blend of several pedagogical methods.

While transfer of extant knowledge and development of lower order skills can be achieved by instructional methods, the delivery of a contextual elements calls for advanced learning methodologies among which can be cited the following:

(a) Generative learning methodologies where students become facilitators. (b) Cooperative learning methodologies that involve students working together in small groups to collaboratively resolve an issue. (c) Student centred learning methods, which encourage questioning, reflection and metacognition, and (d) problem based learning that confronts students with unstructured situations and requires them to identify the problem and recommend a solution.

What we have attempted above is just a first-cut at a huge can of worms. Within the broad framework we have outlined above, a plethora of interconnected issues relating to basic education can be identified, posed and brainstormed. There is an urgent need for such a discourse among educationalists, parents, education administrators, and indeed all conscious citizens.

Courtesy : The Hindu