Education is Child Resource Development
Child is a resource with hidden talents. Any child with an average intelligence could learn. The abilities so inherited by birth has to be developed by ‘adults’. The adults are ‘parents’ and ‘teachers’. In other words education is a joint effort of the family and the school. The foundation laid by parents in the early years of a child will have an influence on the education provided at school. The education received at the both levels will provide the basis to develop the vocational education and training at the tertiary level. By that stage the skills and aptitudes of the child would be clearly identified. It is the main responsibility of the tertiary level institutions to develop them. Therefore the main responsibility of the school is to identify the ‘resources of the child’. We could give a definition as follows.
“Child Resource Development is an education process which develop the personality of a child for the adult life by general education institutes with the assistance of the family. In that process educational guidance will be provided to develop the identified skills and aptitudes at the higher education and training levels.”
This could be taken as the basis for general education in any state.
The education of a child could be divided into main 3 stages.
Family stage – Foundation level up to year 5.
School Stage – General Education level from year 5 to 14.
Professional/vocational Stage – Higher education or vocational training after year 15.
In this article the focus would be on the general education as the attention of every one at present rests on it.
As mentioned above every child is a resource. At the general education level mechanisms should be created to identify the skills or aptitudes every child has and to provide opportunities to develop them at the tertiary level. The responsibility of the state is to establish institutes to absorb every school leaver and to get the support of the private and other organization in that endeavor. In such a situation entering 2 or 3 percent of students to universities and few more to polytechnics and training colleges etc, and forgetting others will not arise. Without such a strategy revising the school curriculum to solve the unemployment problem will be meaningless. The education given for life should be complete. The aim of the general education should be to develop the personality of the child physically, mentally, emotionally to face any situation in his adult life so as to integrate easily with the society. The social skills development is not new to us. In the ancient times as well as in the recent past during the period of assisted schools, there was an emphasis on character development. When we read biographies of great personalities who were product of that system we could see how much influence the schools had exerted on them. With the emphasis on exami- nations we could see the erosion of such good qualities of education. But we could still revive them in the present system within the existing curriculum and co-curricular activities. I would like to emphasis the word ‘existing’, because we do not want mass scale curriculum revisions for that. The necessary social skills, or as they call it now the ‘soft skills’ and related attitudes could be developed with the assistance of the subject specialists who could incorporate few activities or activate the existing dormant ones.
There is a trend now for cognitive development in education. With the advent of ‘knowledge society’ concept the emphasis on cognitive skills is gaining ground. Some of the skills identified like creativity, working in teams or collaboration, problem solving have been in the educational objectives world over for some time. However achieving them is challenging to us even now. Knowledge society goes beyond them and have identified more challenging type characteristics such as ‘focus on abstract concepts’, ‘enhance the students ability to manipulate symbols’ ‘learn to work in global networked virtual teams’ etc, etc. They have been identified as necessary skills for the 21st century. The international tests such as ‘PISA’ are testing them at present among 15+ students in OECD countries. Our new projects like World Bank funded ‘Transforming School Education Project –TSEP’ and ADB funded ‘Education for Knowledge Society Project – EKSP’ have geared towards such tests.
According to a recent analysis of PISA results, it was found that in mathematics, more than a quarter of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds can conceptualize, generalize, and creatively use information. (It has to be mentioned that although China is not an OECD country Shanghai is participating in the test as a developed economic region.) New Zealand which is one of the countries rank high in PISA scores have their reforms named as “Thinking Schools and Learning Society” and have identified one of the key competencies of school education as ‘thinking’ which is termed as a ‘meta cognitive process’.
Therefore the task we have embarked upon with above mentioned new projects is certainly a challenge and it is apparent we have a lot of ground to cover in that regard. What is important is the strategy we adopt to meet this challenge. The principles of ‘Child Resource Development’ would be helpful at this juncture. We have to accept all children cannot be ‘Einstiens’ or for that matter ‘Stephen Hawings’ who is considered as a contender for the scientist of the 20th century title now. Neither could they be ‘Mozarts’ or ‘Don Bradmans’ or any other who have excelled in their chosen fields. But every normal child might have of at least one basic skill among those various fields. The question is, are we trying to push every child towards ‘Eientien’s path’, just because that is the path ‘knowledge society’ is leading us. Or are we going to provide every child the basic education up to a certain level which would develop basic cognitive, physical, emotional and social skills which would be useful for a citizen, while trying to identify their potentialities for which facilities would be provided to develop them at the tertiary level.
One might see this is an attempt to have dual type of education and trying to produce two types of students. Do not we have them now? Whatever the reforms we implemented what happened was the children with cognitive skills succeeded in public examinations while the rest became failures not only in examinations but in the real life too. That is why someone has defined examinations as ‘ a system which legitimize the social imbalance by proving the majority are suitable only for menial jobs.’
What is attempted to say here is as much as we value children with cognitive potentialities we must not forget the vast majority who have hidden potentialities, if developed which we may be useful not only for them but for the country as well. It is a case of identifying them and providing the facilities to develop them. The Central Schools system introduced by late Dr. E.W.W. Kannangara was instrumental in providing rural children who were endowed with cognitive potentialities. Similar type of schools could be found in other countries too. “Navodya” in India (this should not be mistaken with ‘Navodya’ in Sri Lanka) and “Schools for Talented Children’ in Vietnam are two examples for such schools established for children who are called ‘bright’. They are the ones who will benefit from new initiatives in education and could provide higher ‘social rate of returns’. We must give them every assistance possible through the new projects. There is no question about it.
But what about the vast majority who would not be able to fit in with the new order? Are we going to forget them, as we used to do up to now, at the expense of the ‘ bright’ children? Do we have strategies take care of them? Are we prepared to identify that vast undiscovered resource? There are debates on at what level this identification could be done. Is it not possible to have a ‘cumulative record’ for every child rather than a ‘hit and run’ type test like “Examination for Grade V Scholarship’ which is a life and death event for parents especially for mothers and a dreadful affair for most of the young ones. A cumulative record is not the School Based Assessment (SBA) practiced now. But the essence of formative and summative evaluations or even observations of teachers of all the activities children do in the classroom which would help the teachers and parents to identify his/her potentialities, aptitudes, interests etc. The report could be filled once a year and at the end of the basic education school could have a fairly useful ‘profile ‘ of each student. The profile then could be used as a tool for educational guidance at tertiary level. It could even be useful for potential employers.that might be a more comprehensive report on students rather than the results of examination for Grade V Scholarships. Besides that will eliminate the drudgery of primary school children under go for the preparation of that examination. A lot of educationists complain about the pressure put on the primary level students and the mental agony they have to endure, sometimes from grade 1. Basic Education, especially primary education, should be fun for all the children. It should be filled with interesting activities, playing, singing, dancing, acting etc. which would helped to develop both parts of the brain as neurologists point out. Most important is that they would provide the opportunity for teachers to identify hidden talents, aptitudes of children. It is not the case now. They are burden with bookish activities. Could it be one of the reasons for the drop outs at primary level. How many education authorities know that the bulk of the homework given to these children are actually done by parents or their elder siblings or some adult in the neighborhood. Do they know that these adults sometimes have to burn midnight oil to complete the homework with the students. It is high time some serious research is done on these homework. It is very unhealthy situation the educationists have to pay their attention on. There must be changes for healthier situation. Curriculum developers must take a lead in that regard.
On the other hand, if there is something like a ‘student profile’ for educational guidance, students and parents may not go astray with few credits in of G.C.E (O/L) and try to go for streams at A/L not suitable for them. By the time the students and parents realize that, valuable time in their lives with lots of money have been spent.
R. C. Perera (MA –Sussex)education Consultant ( rclarance@yahoo.com)