The Death of Pedagogy: Effective Ways to Learn and Teach

The science of learning-Pedagogy is significant to discover the most effective ways to learn and teach. There used to be a time when people used to travel long distances on their own to meet the teacher they aim to study with. The teacher once satisfied to have taught and assessed his student certifies him to have learned what he aimed to. This certification allowed the students to practice what they had learned.

Later, academic institutes were built that offered degree programs and research opportunities for willing students. Sooner, home-schooling was replaced with kindergartens and nurseries. The process of learning and teaching got advanced. However, according to some authors and philosophers, the systems of learning and teaching-education have failed and learning has been left far behind while treading on the road to advancements.

The term pedagogy seems to be alien to us who have always heard the term “Education System” since our childhood to adolescence, which is inscribed on the gravestone of pedagogy. The science of learning is now a system of teaching pre-designed and revised editions of textbooks to students and assessing their ability to learn the lessons, as well as they can. Then the students are certified to have been promoted which is proof of his/her genius and a parameter to judge their mental capabilities.

Nations Today and Their Education Systems

Today, there are many resources to help us learn anything we want to. It could be a language, craft, cooking, etc. However, if this is the case, why is the world facing a learning crisis? Will it be just to say that unavailability of advancements is the root cause, or should we dig a little deeper?

Former President of America Obama said about the state of the education system of America in 2010, March, “The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens…… and yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher’s quality fall short and other nations outpace us.”

Nations such as Finland and Chile are meant to be the other nations that have outpaced America. This is so because they have given autonomy to their teachers to prioritize their student’s welfare to design their lessons. This home-grown solution as termed in the article education Systems are misaligned with Learning is the secret ingredient behind the success of Finland’s education system. However, the article also states that this approach didn’t work well for systems such as in South Africa, because it proved to be a poor fit for the capacity of teachers and the resources they had at their disposal.

The opacity of the System

According to the article, Education Systems are Misaligned with Learning, “The Education system can have other goals that can hamper efforts to improve learning.” It further says, “These goals can be misaligned with learning, leaving schools with buildings they cannot use and teachers who are not proficient.”

With such goals in action, the aims and objectives of the system are left unquenched. Learning is not restricted to acquiring information about past events in the field of any discipline or history of any continent. It’s about experiencing the world without any boundaries of syllabus and assessments. “Have we been wasting our time?” you might think but this is not exactly what it’s meant to say.

Is it the System or the Students to be blamed?

As the discussion above has made it obvious that for a system to be perfect the resources are not the only things that should be considered. Even nations with unmatched resources are failing.

In such a scenario, our minds probe deeper into the problem and we find out that apart from resources, it’s the easy-mindedness of the students that might elevate the issue of the failure of the education system. Dinesh Yadav in his article, Who is Failing: The Students or The Education System discusses the case of mass failure in Uttar Pradesh. According to the article, “The state government has claimed that it is the measures taken by the government to curb cheating and conduct fair and transparent examinations that have led to the huge number of dropouts and failure among students.”

In this case, the system seems to have played the best part it could, however, it still fails to succeed which makes it obvious that the mindset of students to perform well in their exams and produce transparent results is also a parameter to judge the efficiency of the education system.

There could be many reasons behind such behaviours of students, such as cultural, social, and their interest in studies which should not be managed as a separate case. Coherence is important. Integrated Management of all the possible causes that might fail or weaken the education system along with the system inadequacies should be managed together for a successful future.

Conclusion

I don't mind being taught with chalk and blackboard but I am not ok with being forced to study that I don't want to. Of course, I will run away from school altogether no matter how well-built it is or if its certificate is worthy.

We should focus on seeding the need and will to know in the young hearts rather than pushing them to go to school. This need to know will revolutionalise the system rather than cementing bricks.

✒Yumna Mahmood