What Should Schools Teach?

Aimless, irrelevant and limitless information occupies the core of our education.  It is difficult to see how burdening young brains with broken pieces of information could amount to knowledge and education.

Knowledge exposes the simpler patterns that underlie the complexities of this world. It is the perception of simplicity that enables us to solve our problems. Sometimes the crucial insight is that the root of a problem consists in seeing a problem where none exists.

Our education has become disconnected from life’s problems. What happens in schools and colleges is a ritualistic cramming of written material that is discharged at examinations. We have to have an education that is not distinct from the solution to our problems. 

Education demands more intimate contact with our problems. We should be made aware of problems emotionally, so that we see their urgency, and the compelling necessity to solve them. Creation of such awareness is one of the aims of education. For example, it is important to be emotionally aware of how motor and factory exhausts spew soot and toxic gases into the air and how these destroy our health. How corruption hampers distribution of food and causes children to starve when we have a surplus of food in the country.

Education should not leave us with just an intellectual understanding of problems that enables us to analyze, discuss, write essays and pass exams.  It should compel us to improve our neighbourhood and the quality of lives around us. It should teach us how to co-operate and make us sensitive and kind to others' plight.

Is education doing this for our children?

Why do our children have to learn so many facts? Why do they have to carry so many books?  Why do they have to spend most of their time for private tuitions after their regular school hours? Why did our education have to end up like this?

Is it possible to create a syllabus for schools addressed at life’s problems? 

A SYLLABUS FOR SCHOOLS

HOME STUDIES

• Electrical safety (how to earth electrical appliances, how to prevent electric shock, how to give first aid in the event of electric shock)
• Household and community sanitation: waste and sewage disposal methods as feasible in rural and urban areas including 'slums'.
• Methods to ensure safe and adequate water supply in houses and in community; elementary home plumbing.
• Household repair and maintenance: pens, telephones, cycles, scooters, cars, computers
• How to sew buttons, tailor simple garments
• Cooking a nutritious, healthy and balanced diet

HEALTH STUDIES

• Healthy eating (healthy vegetarian eating, healthy non-vegetarian eating)
• Exercise for health (Aerobics and isometrics)
• Basic first aid: How to treat simple ailments: Cuts and wounds, common cold, diarrhoea, vomiting; How to suspect serious illnesses: meningitis, pneumonia, heart attack, high blood pressure, diabetes etc. How to administer basic life support in the event of cardiorespiratory arrest.
• Basics of self care for common chronic diseases such as diabetes, high BP, high cholesterol.  Target values to achieve, basic lifestyle measures and awareness of basic medications.
• Healthy sexual behaviour: Sexual feelings, sexual mores, safe sex
• Inferiority feelings and ways to end them.
• Stopping the spread of drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse.
• Basic rules for mental health. How to reduce ego and self-centredness.Meditation.

SOCIAL STUDIES

• Civil behaviour: friendly behaviour: understanding other’s needs. How to assert your rights. How to be nice and polite without being exploited; how not to be bullied.
• Citizen’s legal rights. Civil administration: how the government is meant to work for citizens and ensure basic needs. How to recognise criminality and corruption at the political and beaurocratic level. Legal ways to deal with these.
• Co-operative movement and team work.: How to co-operate transcending man-made boundaries (nation, region, community etc)

MATHEMATICS AND LANGUAGE STUDIES

• Mathematics and daily life: money matters, home and business accounting, banking, taxation.
• English, Hindi, local language: how to converse; effective written communication.

THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL METHOD

• Scientific method: Basic principles of scientific and technological discovery and progress. Insights into what it means to know – the elements of epistemology
• The aims of science – how science relates to the problems of living. Is science essential? Or is it needed only for the specialist technologist?
• How to gather information on a subject: the use of reference books, libraries and the internet.
• The basic principles of engineering, health care, management, administration and governance as well as science relating to natural phenomena that we see around. The mastery of the method must be the aim and not comprehensive coverage as is the practice now.

ARTS AND LITERATURE

• The basics of Art, and artistic appreciation.
• Paintings, Music, Cinema, Literature
• A syllabus like this gives emphasis primarily on developing the competence to lead healthy and co-operative lifestyles rather than the traditional teaching of linguistic, memory and mathematical skills alone.