The Changemaker School

Episode 1: Why Reimagine Education?

Why reimagine education? This question is a global one and something very personal to each one of us. Is education something that should prepare us for life? Is it something that should instead create a space for growth, learning and evolving as human beings? Or is it something that should check, test, and slot us into neat categories?  What is its relevance in the 21st century and what is the journey that has led me to walk this path. All this and more being shared in this podcast. One may ask, "but we turned out to be okay" and "isn't all this just a fad" education has existed in its form, stood sturdy for so many years and it delivers measurable results so then "why change?" Well, it's not as simple as it sounds. Let's try and answer a quick quiz to find out where you stand on this matter? 1. Which product or system or service around us have we let be for over 3 centuries and we look at it still and say - it served my great, great, great grandfather well, it should be okay. 2. How do you know what you could have done or achieved in a different system? How could you know whether each of your classmates walked the highest mountain they could climb? 3. How do we really know how 'happy' someone else is if we were never really taught to be aware of our emotions? 4. How does someone who has gone through the trauma of varying degrees ranging from minor name-calling or bullying and being unable to respond or deal with it to extreme levels of sexual abuse or depression talk about what they went through in our so-called okay system where the pressure was to be okay no matter what? 5. How do you know what kind of joy or happiness or calmness or centeredness you are being deprived of if you never know that kind of connection or bonding with self or others is possible in the first place? 6. It's like asking someone who has never seen colours to compare a world filled with colours to his or her grey world. How are you supposed to know? How is anyone supposed to know? But there are ways to know if you paid attention - 1. Your struggle to discover your purpose 2. Your struggle to connect with your own feelings and emotions 3. Your struggles to create boundaries, say no to people, stop looking for validation from external sources 4. Your struggle to stop seeking happiness in competitive or material success and searching for it inside yourself 5. Your struggle to know what your core values were and to learn to stand by them 6. Your struggle to know how to belong to a community bound by something higher than 'just fun' 7. Your struggle to understand and forgive your parents or siblings 8. Your struggle to understand where your triggers come from and why you tend to hate yourself so much despite your stupendous success 9. Your struggle with making connections that are deep and meaningful beyond the superficial 10. Your struggle with being vulnerable 11. Your struggle at being able to see beyond cultural norms…(and the list goes on) You can say that why should a school work on all of this? Isn't this what adult life is for? To fail and find out? School's purpose is to teach and give knowledge, assess the child on that and give them ample exposure to a lot of children so the child learns to bully or get bullied (or both) and learn from that experience too, make some friends, lose some, have heartbreaks and learn to move on. Well, yes and no. This would be the harshest form of indoctrination that you are putting your child through and if the intention is to give them a holistic approach to life don't you think they need to be equipped with the necessary tools to deal with them too? Give the podcast a listen and let us know "Are you onboard to reimagine education?"

Episode 2: What needs to be reimagined in Education

When we saw the level of disconnected, disengaged, passive learners we knew we were staring at a serious symptom that we had to get to the root of. As we dug deeper the pillars of a school - the closed-ended syllabus, grade-wise banding of students based on age, exam as a metric for assessment, and syllabus disconnected with the child's learning context along with a focus on discipline and obedience emerged as the root causes. These, in turn, resulted in children having low self-esteem, feeling like they couldn't learn, and hence, they shouldn't try, not feeling connected to what they were learning, and using distraction as a strategy to get even further disconnected from learning. The constant social media frenzy, peer pressure, bullying, and expectations from parents/culture don't help the cause either.  Education is in an urgent need to be reimagined to create joyful, deep, connected, purpose-driven learners who care about being changemakers for life.