Education vs. Learning

When so many of us agree that education is the key to freeing the mind, to solving most of the world’s problems, to making people from all corners of the globe come together, we also mean education in the traditional, conventional sense, maybe because we’ve never thought of anything different. Education for us means a teacher, a school, a set syllabus. perhaps time frames within which certain bits of knowledge or information need to be imbibed, digested and then displayed so we can be tested on our understanding. Maybe it’s time to change our way of thinking. In a world that is changing so fast, should our old ideas about education be the only way there is? Yes, there have been changes through the years in the way education has been structured and perceived but it was all done within a certain framework. Is it time to think out of the box? Sugata Mitra seems to think so and to prove his point, he’s been experimenting with new ideas over the last eleven years all over the world.

What seems to be emerging is that children have an innate sense of learning and that need not be within the narrow functions of education. Maybe what we need to do now is to give them the tools and the opportunities and set their minds free to learn what can be learned in the way that they want to learn it. It means leaving them to go out into the unknown and helping them explore and go forward to conquer new ideas and frontiers and even forge new paths to get to their goals. Pretty much like a guided tour as against a voyage of discovery. Maybe one would learn a lot more facts the first way but a lot more experience in the other.

Experiments like these amaze us who have been educated in the conventional way because it defies all logic – or rather, logic as we know it. If we need to facilitate a brave new world for our children, maybe it is time we took a step back after providing them with the opportunities. With technology racing ahead, it’s their world – a world they understand and grasp much better and much faster than we do. Maybe it’s time they started learning instead of being educated. Maybe it’s time we stopped putting boundaries to their boundless imagination and capabilities. Maybe it’s time we guided from behind rather than lead from the front. Maybe it’s time we cut them loose to discover rather than fence them in. Maybe it’s time.