I recently watched a talk (video at bottom of this post) that he gave to school students in London. The focus was on how education needs to change to better prepare children for a future that is unknowable and uncertain.

In his bestselling book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval makes prophecies which are at one level enlightening, but often frightening. He writes extensively about how life and humans have changed over the centuries. What is very obvious is that although everyone agrees that change is constant, few people realise that the pace of change has increased a lot in the last fifty years.

Here is an excerpt from his book:

If you lived in China in 1018…it was clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff their armies and bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be forty, and the human body would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy or fight on horseback – and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.

In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look like in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to bioengineering and direct brain-computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.

Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

My early career was spent shuffling money around in London (legally). At the time, people my age would pride themselves on knowing how the financial markets worked and how to build financial models on Excel. In just ten years, the same knowledge will get you a first interview, at best. The world of finance has changed so much – if you want to get a top job in finance, you better know how to code (at least a little), understand how technology works and be able to understand statistics (needed) and calculus (depending on which part of the markets you work in).

Want another example? Look at crypto and the entire ecosystem that has spawned since Satoshi Nakomoto first put out his whitepaper. In less than 15 years, the crypto ecosystem is worth a whopping $2 trillion! Irrespective of whether you think crypto is a ponzi scheme or the best invention since physical money, that is staggering growth in a very short span of time.

In short, the world is changing. And fast.

Yuval’s worry (and mine to a certain extent) is that with the way education is done in 95% of schools, we are preparing children for a world that will no longer exist.

Doing is becoming more important than knowing. Communication is becoming more important than cramming.

So what does one do about it? How does one stay relevant? How can we educate children such that they don’t end up on the rubbish heap of the ‘useless class’ as Yuval calls it?

Most policy makers and experts agree that so-called soft skills are going to be increasingly important in the future. Collaboration, creativity, communication and critical thinking (the 4 Cs) are often touted as the most important skills of the future. Almost everyone agrees on this, but our current educational systems and curricula hardly reflect this. If you chose a school at random in Bangalore and visited them, you’d find 8th grade students steeped in individual study, repeatedly practicing problems in order to prefect the method of solving them, and generally trying to stuff as much of their textbooks into the storage device inside of their heads. This doesn’t in any way sound like collaborative activity or an activity involving much critical thinking.

One of the main arguments for why education needs to change is because knowledge doesn’t stay relevant for life. In previous generations, it was sufficient to go to school, then pick a major in college and do that for the rest of your life. Often at the same company. The knowledge gained in school and college usually was sufficient to tide you through a career, usually with some tweaking and polishing over time. Good luck with trying to get through life like this in the 21st century.

So what is the most important skill going forward?

It is the ability to learn and to reinvent oneself again and again. If one assumes that the world is going to continue to change, then it is guaranteed that in time, whatever knowledge you have will either become irrelevant or be in need of regular updating. Most times, this will come as a shock, but such shocks are already taking people by surprise in various industries. With automation becoming more ubiquitous, the rate at which people are being made redundant (in more ways than one) is leapfrogging the rate at which humans can learn new skills in order to take advantage of opportunities that come up as a natural consequence of such disruption.

In such a world, emphasising technical skills which may or may not be relevant in the long run sounds like a recipe for disaster. Especially when you spend the first two decades of your life engaged in such activity.

So what should we emphasise?

Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invest new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

Yuval Noah Harari

So how can you prepare children to deal with change? In my humble and (as yet) inaccurately formed opinion, principally, in three ways:

1. Exposure: Giving children exposure to as much of the world as possible and helping them tie threads together is fundamental to making sense of an increasingly complex and changing world. School still focuses on traditional careers – all syllabi assume that 80% of children will go into engineering, law, medicine or accounting / finance. Fortunately, the world has expanded. Children have a lot more choice than was available twenty years ago. Curricula have to change to reflect this expansion of opportunity.
2. Mental and emotional fluidity: Learning how to learn sounds nice. But what does that even mean? Aren’t we all learning all the time? The older one grows, the harder it becomes to learn new skills. Humans suffer from commitment bias. When a person has invested (time, money and effort) so much in learning engineering and then working as an engineer, they are going to do everything they can to maintain the status quo when faced with a situation where their current skillset is becoming obsolete. So coming round to the idea that you will probably have to (and should) reinvest yourself every few years requires a very different way of looking at the world. Instead of looking at learning and education as an ‘investment’ that one makes in the first 2 decades of life, we need to accept that learning is a lifelong endeavour and very much a part of adult life.
3. Creativity: When the world changes, it usually expands. This expansion happens because when industries are dead and buried, it is usually because of innovation in a related sector which has been successful in creating a world order which the market deems more relevant. But this process starts happening well below industries actually collapse. When it comes into public consciousness, it feels like a watershed moment, but it very rarely is. The seeds of change are often invisible and hushed. In a world where constant disruption will always give rise to new opportunity, it pays to be able to think creatively and innovatively.

Point 1 above is relatively easy to do. But it requires schools and educators to think very differently about their place in the world. School needs to become a place where children get a peek into how wonderfully vast and expansive the world is – in terms of culture, opportunity, and fields of work. Points 2 and 3 are obviously harder to do. How does one teach mental and emotional fluidity? And how do you teach creativity?

These are hard questions to answer. And even harder to implement. Which is why I will stop rambling here and leave those for future posts!

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As part of the theme, they did a number of experiments which helped them understand the properties of sounds waves. At the end of the theme, a couple of children did a project showcasing what they had learnt.

Here is a project from Tanya. She described 7 facts about sound that surprised her as they went through the theme.

And this is Kiran’s video. He describes wavelengths and vibrations in great detail.

Pretty cool huh?! The children have now moved on to the theme on light, so it sure is a science filled theme for them!

Children in Bangalore haven’t been to school for 18 months now. And that is a very long time to stay away from your friends and the vibrant atmosphere that school offers.

Earlier this week, I asked the Grade 4 children to do some research for a field trip. With cases being low and the holidays coming up, I wondered if we could take the children out to some place which isn’t too crowded.

Below, I post an embed of the research one of our children produced. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, ever since the pandemic started, we have focused a lot on digital creativity and the tools that enable it. This is an example of how digital tools can help children bring their ideas alive in a manner that notebooks simply don’t allow.

Scroll to the right to see more!

It is amazing to see how creative children can get with tools like Canva. It has also allowed us to experiment with different formats for homework and assignments. Stay tuned as I share more work in the coming weeks!

Given how pervasive the internet is, being able to create and share online is only going to become increasingly important. Resumes will probably become extinct very soon

We’ve done it for 18 months now. 

Wow! 18 months! 

If you’re not in India and are reading this, a quick FYI. Primary schools in India have been shut since March 2020. All teaching has been online since then. 

You’d think we’d be experts at it by now, but when it comes to online teaching and learning, there are always chances to improve. 

When the pandemic hit in March of 2020, students and teachers alike took to this new mode of education with gusto. Being able to communicate and learn online was enjoyable and different. 

In the last 18 months, we have learned a ton about what works, what doesn’t and how to keep learners engaged. Online learning is great for certain topics and situations. The medium isn’t without its drawbacks of course. Over time, we’ve seen that for some things, we probably won’t ever go back to the way we used to teach. 

So, let’s get right into it. In this post, I will try to work through the advantages and disadvantages of online learning from both a teacher’s and student’s perspective. 

Full disclosure: the points below are not applicable to all students and teachers. What I list below is of my experience teaching children between the ages of 4 and 10 (the age demographic at the Shishya Jigyasa Academy). 

Also, this post assumes that live classes are the predominant form of online learning (which is what we do at TSJA). 

You might find that for most situations, the points below are generally true. 

Advantages for students

Use of the internet: Given the medium makes use of the internet, online learning is great for teaching children how to navigate the internet and to make best use of the vast amount of knowledge available for free. This is one aspect where we have seen our students improve in leaps and bounds — they know where to go for various types of information and enjoy the process of looking for, sifting through and using the information they find. Additionally, this period of online learning has also been a good opportunity to teach children how to stay safe online. 

Synchronous and asynchronous content: Assuming that children also attend live classes when learning online, they get the benefit of revising topics after class using asynchronous content. This also helps give them different perspectives on the same topic. Sometimes, I record a video using Loom to explain certain topics and send it to my students — this usually happens when I feel like I want to give them some more background for a piece of work that I have set for them. 

Digital creativity: If you spend considerable time online, you probably realise how important digital creativity is. The internet is literally bursting at its seams with the innovation and creativity of creators from across the world. In a world where anyone can be a creator, knowing how to use the various tools at your disposal is critical to becoming a productive internet citizen. The children at TSJA have been introduced to tools like Canva, Anchor and Youtube — all with the aim of helping them share their thoughts and experiences in a digital format. 

In fact, one of the best decisions we made last year was to start a digital newsletter called The Fun Times. The children have since then contributed to this newsletter in myriad ways — making videos, podcasts, drawings, writing stories and composing poems. And they love sharing the newsletter with friends and family when it goes out. 

Advantages for teachers

Tools for interactive teaching: Perhaps the biggest advantage for teachers is the ability to use tools which make teaching interactive. From quizzing platforms to websites where children read passages and then answer questions, teachers can utilise a vast array of ed-tech tools to make learning engaging, interactive and fun. We have found that such learning is something the students enjoy a lot, particularly when we give them a variety of tools to use.

Use of internet resources: Since you are not constrained with the resources available in the classroom, online teaching gives teachers the opportunity to experiment with different types of content — videos, articles, infographics and more. Plenty of research shows that when we engage more of our senses, it results in better learning and greater recall of information. Multimedia resources allow teachers to stimulate more of the senses, in comparison to just a textbook or a blackboard. 

Disadvantages for students

Connectivity issues: One aspect of online learning that has plagued many students, particularly those logging in from villages or remote areas, is poor connectivity. As a result, many children miss out on parts of the class as they can’t hear or see the teacher when connectivity is bad. This greatly reduces the propensity of the learner to engage with what is happening in class. Audio is the most important aspect of online learning. As far as possible, we try to ensure that the audio works well even if the video doesn’t. 

Can feel impersonal: For shy children, making a connection with the teacher in front of the entire class can be a nerve-wracking experience. Asking doubts can become an act of courage, whereas in a physical class this happens in a natural manner, especially when the teacher walks around the class. As such, online classes can make it difficult for teachers to connect with students who are reserved. This can be fixed using features such as breakout rooms, but it is not the same as what can be achieved in an actual classroom. 

Not suitable for children with learning difficulties: Online learning does not translate to teaching children with learning difficulties. Children who need one-on-one support often require a teacher sitting next to them. The online medium just does not lend itself to giving the support that children with learning difficulties need. This is especially true if parents of such children are unable to sit with them during class, which in any case is a lot to ask for.  

Out of sight, out of mind: For various reasons, some students keep their videos off during online classes. What children don’t understand is that seeing their faces is like an analytics dashboard for a teacher — when the teacher can’t see their facial expressions, it is close to impossible for the teacher to gauge whether the class is understanding or not. Which is why at TSJA, we insist that children keep their videos on. Non-verbal communication is such an integral aspect of communication, and having videos off shuts this pathway off for both student and teacher. I don’t have the data to back this up, but my hunch is that students who keep videos off interact less in class, are involved less in class discussions (by peers and teachers), feel less engaged and hence learn a lot lesser than their peers who keep videos on. 

This tweet below talks of this dynamic

Disadvantages for teachers

Lack of digital know-how: Though this hasn’t been an issue at TSJA, the experience of some other schools shows us that when teachers lack basic digital skills, the quality of online teaching is greatly diminished. I have often heard students from other schools complain that their teachers don’t know how to use technology or can’t engage students online. Facilitation of online classes is a skill which is quite different to teaching a physical classroom. Having said that though, it can be learned. 

Difficult to judge how children are doing: Online, especially with younger learners, it can become tricky to ascertain whether a child has grasped a concept that has just been taught. Often, I find myself asking the class if they’ve all understood, and I get a . But when I give them a problem set to solve, or a question to answer, I realise that a few children have not understood what was taught. In a physical class, it would be a lot easier to make such judgements. 

Excessive parental support: An aspect of online school that is at odds with physical school is that in some instances, parents have been sitting in on their child’s classes. Except in situations where the child needs such support, it usually is detrimental to the child’s progress. When parents sit in on the classes, they are often tempted to help their children with answers and suggestions during class discussions. Over time, children get used to this support and fail to develop independence in learning. Besides, this also makes for an unnatural mode of communication between student and teacher. 

On the whole, online learning and teaching open up opportunities that weren’t possible in the pre-internet age. It has opened up a world where the best teachers can teach thousands of students. At the same time, students can reach out to teachers from anywhere in the world, while simultaneously making use of awe-inspiring content on Youtube, Khan Academy and other such platforms. 

Having said that though, nothing beats a lively, dynamic in-class environment. Students and teachers all over the country must be eagerly awaiting the reopening of school. Let’s hope we can all make it work whilst keeping everyone safe.

Do let us know your thoughts and how online learning has worked for your child!

In this post, we capture the first seven posts from the last week.

On Conformity

The first one is from Steve Wozniak, on conformity.

Isn’t it high time we began to look at what makes children unique, rather than how they’re similar?

The world is expanding at a rapid pace, and with it, our interpretations of ability.

On Compliance

‘Children have a mind of their own’, you often hear.Yes they do!

And they need to be given as much opportunity to express their thoughts and ideas.

That is how you encourage innovation and free-thinking.

On Purpose

What’s the purpose of school?

We believe it should be to introduce children to as much as possible, so they can make informed choices when they grow up.

Paul Graham, legendary venture capitalist and investor, tends to agree!

On Change

In a world that changes fast, what is the best skill to have?

It isn’t a particular degree, nor a skillset.

It is the ability to stay fluid and to be able to learn whatever you need to in order to get what you want.

Which is why we try and incorporate a lot of the science of learning into what we do.

On Interests

Children by nature are very curious. They are interested in many things at any point in time, and these tend to change.

As such, we need to think of life as a long journey in which they will pick up many skills.

Choosing science or commerce in high school is not the most important decision – it is only the first of many. Nothing is written in stone.

On Learning

If anything, the pandemic has shown us that it is now possible to learn from anyone, anywhere.

Children have access to the best teachers online.

Which means that schools will have a very different role in such a world.

What is that role? Follow TSJA for long enough and you’ll know

On Automation

It is no surprise that automation will take away many jobs, perhaps even wipe out entire industries.

So what skills should children be developing in order to be able to thrive in the future?

The World Economic Forum (WEF) lists skills such as creativity, empathy, problem solving and collaboration as the most needed skills in the future. As such, schools need to focus on providing opportunity to develop such skills.

This means schools which focus only on academics will do their students a disservice.

We recently had a chat with Titash Neogi, founder of Adaptiv, an AI startup which helps people navigate the future of work. We wanted to get his opinion on what he thinks will be of most use from a skills perspective in a world ten years from now. The video embedded below has all the answers. (Hint: Education must change a lot if we have to thrive in a drastically different world 10 years from now)

That’s it for now!

Do follow us on Facebook and Instagram to stay abreast of the latest developments in science and learning!

I was on a casual internet wander the other day when I come across a quote:

Art encourages children to think, developing skills and confidence as they go.

Which got me thinking. In their early years, children muck around with lots of art — play dough, clay, painting, colouring, sketches. You name it, and a preschool going child dabbles in some form of art on a weekly basis. 

And then at some point in the primary years, arts gets the cold shoulder. Children spend less and less time on anything artistic as they grow older. And they spend increasing amounts of time perfecting more technical skills like math, science and coding. 

On reading that quote, I was motivated to dig deeper. As luck would have it, I landed upon a few papers written by researchers who tried to answer the following question:

Does arts education and training transfer to skills enhancement in non-art subjects?

In countries like the US and others in Europe, the inclusion of arts in the curriculum seems to hinge on the answer to this question. 

Yes, that’s right. 

Policy makers need to be convinced that art learning leads to the development of cognitive skills in other academic areas like math and reading in order to justify it as a part of the curriculum. In other words, inclusion of the arts in the curriculum seems to depend on whether arts can lead to improvement in test scores. 

But that misses the point entirely, doesn’t it? Art in any form is an inherently creative endeavour. Whether you talk of dance, music or the visual arts, they all require creativity, innovation and pushing the boundaries of what’s been done before. 

The right question to be asking is whether art has a unique influence on learning in the broadest sense, rather than limit the discussion to test scores and other easily measured metrics. 

Most fields are creative

Whether you talk of math, science or music, performance at the highest level involves (and requires) high levels of creativity. The application of science at the highest levels if a deeply creative undertaking. Look at the traditional K-12 science curriculum though, and you’d be inclined to think otherwise.

The typical child in 2021 is introduced to science as a collection of theorems, formulae and calculations. No wonder most children need to be goaded into studying science at the highest level. They see it as a dry and lacking in inspiration. Take the case of Mathematics and the proportion of ‘haters’ grows even more. 

Most top-flight mathematicians don’t sit on their desks solving sums all day. If you get onto Youtube and listen to a talk or interview involving a mathematician, you will immediately realise that the math you did at school is very different to the math professional mathematicians do.  

So if the top brass in almost every field point to creativity as their strongest skill, then why is so little importance given to it in school? 

We don’t fully understand how the brain works

Part of the reason is that despite the substantial leaps in our understanding of the brain and how it works, we don’t quite know how different parts of the brain work together to create new discoveries, ideas and insights. 

What we do know from a number of studies is that practising the arts (any art) does lead to enhancements in cognitive processing i.e. those who practice art have a higher degree of cognitive processing in domains related to their art. For example, studies suggest that children who are exposed to musical training early on tend to become fluent and faster readers than children who aren’t. 

However, these findings are not necessarily causal. In other words, does the part of the brain involved in musicality also play a role in assisting reading? Why would one lead to the other? We don’t quite know.

The scientific case for arts inclusion

What we do know beyond doubt is that the more our senses are stimulated, the better our retention and the better the learning. Part of the reason for this is evolutionary — we evolved in a multi-sensorial environment. The stimuli we received ever since we came into being combined visual, auditory and olfactory stimuli. 

And then all of a sudden, we learnt to tame ourselves, and stuffed our children into classrooms where the dominant mode of learning was and still is text based. The human brain remembers images by a factor of 6x better than it remembers sound or text. And yet, we hardly have any interesting visuals accompany the drab textbooks that children are forced to study from. 

At its very base, visual arts bring into being our most dominant sense — vision. When children engage more than one sense, the learning is more likely to arouse emotion, which then increases the chances of it producing longer-term learning in the brain. 

The same is the logic for including music and dance in the curriculum — when more than one sense is stimulated, we tend to feel more in sync with the activity, which results in deeper learning and better recall.  

‘Why are the children doing so much art and craft?’

This is a question we’ve been asked occasionally by parents. We do a lot of art and craft in school — in fact, I don’t know of too many other schools that do as much craft as we do. But the reason for doing it is clear. The act of creativity brings out emotions which few other activities do. When children are emotionally attached to their work, they are bound to connect with the topic being studied on a deeper level. 

Every theme we do incorporates lots of projects, art and craft work. Art is a universal language; and bringing as much of it as possible into the school curriculum helps with giving children a base from which to explore various topics in depth. 

Imagine the following situation. You are trying to teach children about light. Some children don’t really show much of an interest in the physics of light. How do you get them to become interested? Bringing art into the classroom is one surefire way to ignite the passions of even the most disinterested learners. There is something special about art in its ability to give humans a unique view of the complex world that they live in. 

Some recent examples from school

At TSJA, we have always believed that visual arts can complement learning effectively. All our themes incorporate an art and design element, with the various grades engaging in projects at a level appropriate to their skill level. 

Just recently, the third and fourth graders started a theme on the weaves and embroideries of India. The theme involves matter on the differences between natural and synthetic fibres, types of dyeing, patterns, texture and colour. As part of the theme, the children engaged in making tie and dye. Below are a few examples made by the children. 

Even though school is currently online, it was clear to see that engaging in this activity really brought the theme alive for the children. One father of an 8 year old boy remarked, “I didn’t think he would show much interest in this theme — but he seems to be enjoying it a lot”. 

In parting

Some of the most successful people owe their success to their ability to be creative. And I’m not talking only about designers and artists. Many successful inventors and businessmen talk about the importance of creativity in helping them gain access to new ideas and insights. 

Even if it doesn’t lead to improvement in test scores, a curriculum that involves arts greatly aids children in expanding their understanding of the world. In many cases, art can become the bridge that connects seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge. 

Do let us know your thoughts in the comments!