Reading At The Heart Of Education & Learning

"By reading we read" and this is true. We also learn to write by writing - the more practice children get, the better they become. There is the a classic saying 'Practice makes a man perfect!

With persistence, one can get the hardest rock with the softest rope and with practice the heaviest brain likewise becomes super  ...only if you read will you become good at whatever you want to learn, and in todays world where the attention spans are being reduced to split seconds, the ability to read and comprehend tends to get lost. 

Having had the honour and privilege of running one of India's premiere bookstores, there is not a day when I have not had a parent or an individual requesting for help to guide them to enable their child to start reading books. Reading is the heart of education, the knowledge of almost every subject in school flows from reading. One must be able to read the word problem in math in order to understand it. If you cannot read the science or social studies chapter, you cannot answer the questions at the end of the chapter. The complicated computer manual is essential to its operation, but it mud be read. Reading is arguably the single most important social factor in any society.

“@RoomtoRead: “When a book is good, people want to talk about it. Therefore, bookstores themselves are social spaces”

Innovation and Design

Is the Education system helping us innovate or are we simply preparing the students to do assembly line work? The more we put in place uniform systems, curriculum and structure, our education will deliver less innovation and design. When you give a block of wood, with two basic tools like a mallet and a chisel to a young person, you will make the person think design and evolve. If you give Lego blocks, a kit to assemble an aero-model or simply use templates, you will stifle design and creativity. The kits and uniform building blocks are good business sense for marketeers, less effort for teachers and easily help build prefab models which are misinterpreted as creation in our education system.

When children are given a container full of play dough or our good old plasticine, they make shapes and put thought to action. If you provide moulds/ templates with the play dough you will make them use the shape and create a mere cast! Design is an evolution of vision and free thought, from chaos to order, from fuzzy logic to logic. The essence is freedom and the evolution of the mind. 'Jugaad' our frugal and flexible approach to innovation has been the true spirit of an Indian. Innovation helps us do more with less, generates original ideas and pioneers growth. It all begins with the honest and true action guided by a free spirit of the young mind.

Principal As The Chief Learning Leader

Should the principal be the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) with due qualification and degrees? Are owner driven schools, which look at the school purely as a business enterprise better than schools run by charities? Such questions always make us think and we do debate this matter often. Many good schools are owner driven and do not have the principal with the degree of an academician. What is most important however that the Principal / Head of the School should be the Chief Learning Leader.

Image courtesy danpontefract.com

Learning is the act of acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing, existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves. Learning is not compulsory; it is contextual. It does not happen all at once, but builds upon and is shaped by what we already know. To that end, learning may be viewed as a process, rather than a collection of factual and procedural knowledge. ~ Wikipedia