Learning can be a great fun exercise

INNOVATIVE IDEAS

Though most schools are downright boring, some can be great fun too. Numerous experi-mental schools across the world have demonstrated this repeatedly. We have a stereotypical image of a school – a massive jail-like building with an imposing facade; children in uniforms hunched on benches and exposed to just one adult – their class teacher. This need not be so.

Our own Gijubhai Badheka ran a cool school in the 1930’s in Bhavnagar, Gujarat for two full decades. He asked a fundamental question: “Why should all 50 children in my class have the same textbooks?” So, he did away with textbooks. Instead, with the same money he bought 150 profusely illustrated story books and started a classroom library!

Rather than read just three textbooks, he wanted the children to experience the joy of discovering the whole world of books. At times, he would animatedly recount these stories. Soon, all the children were hooked to reading. They also started enacting these stories into plays.

Soon they became so good with words that whenever they forgot their dialogues on stage, they invented new ones! Rote learning atrophies the neurons and makes the brain dumb. Children were not born to sit quietly on benches the whole day. They love movement and activities – making things, doing things.

Before children understand a thing they need loads of experiences with concrete things. They need to touch, taste, smell, feel, choose, arrange, pull things apart and put them back again. They need to experiment with real things. We live in a consumerist society which has lots of junk. Children could bring throwaway stuff from home – old newspapers, magazines, plastic bottles, tooth brushes, cardboard boxes, etc.

All this could be segregated in a dozen-odd corrugated cartons in school. This societal waste could be transformed into artifacts of great beauty using very rudimentary tools. This will constitute a very low-cost Activities Centre for children. Here old newspapers could be folded into a dozen different caps – a Cricket cap or a Gandhi cap.

Every exercise in paper folding is actually a lesson in practical geometry – concrete learning about angles and polygons. For example, children will soon discover that tying a knot in a long, parallel paper strip makes an amazing regular pentagon! Old glossy magazines could be cut into little squares to make flapping ear rabbits and birds of peace.

Learning science the old way of mugging definitions is certainly not much fun. Children can learn amazing science by making simple models using junk. It will also be a lesson in cleaning up the earth. For instance, they can make a simple pump to blow up a balloon using a piece of old cycle tube and two film cans.

They can improvise a simple electric motor for less than twenty rupees. A plastic straw and a broomstick can be put together to make an excellent centrifuge. If the model works the first time, it’s no fun at all. It’s only when children struggle and make it work, do they feel a sense of deep satisfaction.

Science becomes truly interesting when children work on projects which, apart from being fun, have some relevance for society.

Schools are boring because it is only the teacher who SPEAKS. Children just LISTEN passively. It is actually the children who need to speak the most to practice their oratory skills, but in reality the teacher does most of it. Each child comes to school with her/his own set of unique experiences. Unfor-tunately, schools care a damn for them. They are busy plastering some alien standard curriculum from this or that musty educational board. This certainly does not excite children.

History becomes alive and interesting when children are taken for outings and field trips.
Here they learn about people, monuments, trees, wild flowers, the various bazaars and things people do. Children are always fascinated by places where real things are made – be it a bakery, an oil mill or a soft drink plant.

A good school tries hard to bring a bit of the outside world into the school every day. They bring in local craftsmen – carpenters, potters, cycle repairman, musicians, writers, artists, poets, politicians - if only to prove the point that schooling is all about living and it has an umbilical connection to the society in which it exists.

Many educated parents are rejecting the mass factory schooling and instead opting for smaller, more humane schools. Visitors to the Sudbury Valley School near Boston are pleasantly surprised on arriving at the school.

There are no classrooms, no teachers, no textbooks, no uniforms and no exams. They see the children perpetually playing, discussing, and doing their own work without any adult interference.

The visitors often think that they have landed up in the school at the wrong time – they think it must be the interval or the recess. And this is what a good school should be – a place where children celebrate and cherish every moment of their lives!

(Arvind Gupta is a toy maker and shares his passion for books and science through his website http://arvindguptatoys.com)