After teaching for twenty three years in schools of different kinds, I must admit that I still do not know “how children learn”.
In the college of education where I was taught that education is a “social process”. From then on I seemed to be wading in an endless sea of terms and definitions, some of which, or so it seemed to me at least then, were invented more to justify the teaching of education as a course, rather than to help young teachers teach better.
Education was supposed to stem from the latin word “educare” which meant to lead.
Curriculum meant “a course to be run”. Teachers must have their “aims” and “objectives” clear. A syllabus was the content for a limited period of time for a single subject. A “curriculum” was meant for many subjects spread over a greater duration of time. A good lesson had lots of “activities” and was not just “chalk and talk”.
Before every class we had to write out an elaborate lesson plan which had to have a list of “learning outcomes”, which was a set of about dozen activities such as” identify”, “compare” and “reason” and which had to “dovetail” with the “objectives”, which in turn had to dovetail with the “aims” of the curriculum. It was left to our imagination to decipher what “dovetail” meant. Then there was the famous “Herbartian” model of teaching in which we had to “recall” everything we had been taught the previous lesson and end with a brilliant “blackboard summary” (Johann Herbart, after whom this method was named, evidently lived at a time when the “chalk and talk” method was still in vogue).
Finally, after having struggled with all these terms, when most of us were in splits and ready for a period of mental rehabilitation in NIMHANS, we were told it is taboo to enter a class without a “teaching aid”, a chart or a model which would make our teaching vivid.
To comfort us, our lecturers told us that a certain person called Bloom had actually outlined more than four hundred learning outcomes and we should consider ourselves lucky that we had to learn only a dozen.
Every year more terms and definitions are introduced through dubious “workshops” meant to retrain teachers. But to Bloom’s credit (and Herbart’s too), the terms they introduced still reign supreme. Old is gold.
The very nature of what education sets out to do dictates that education is everybody’s business, which makes it more complicated. At the core of education lies the question-how does the learner know? This is a question that we may never answer and to accept our ignorance may lead to the wisdom we call education.