Selecting your child’s school is an excruciating and painful experience. Expectations are magnanimous; reality is horrendous. Only a few possibilities can spare you from this conundrum: either you refrain from having kids or they are not of school age yet. Living abroad is also an option, but only for a handful.
The masses in Pakistan have to just sit and watch their kids spending years in schools and failing to be competent enough to compete internationally. In schools, the course content is obsolete, teaching methodologies are ancient and assessments are not even close to a global system.
Sadly, despite parents’ sheer hard work, their kids tend not to reap fruits they had initially expected. The question remains: What do our school lack? More interestingly, why do all these subjects of work ethics, personal virtues fail to express themselves in our society? Why is the country being relegated to worst rankings in corruption, rule of law, civic sense, road accidents, safety, physical and mental health? Why is novelty rare and polarisation in abundance?
These are hard questions, but if we linger on to answer and address them, the future is going to be even harder for our generations who are unable to practise and project what is contained in their books. Did our schools ever gauge how much our students actually learn from what is taught to them?
In 1956, Benjamin Bloom and his collaborators published a framework for categorising educational goals; taxonomy of educational objectives. It answers some of the above-mentioned questions and our turmoil.
Familiarly known as Bloom’s taxonomy, this framework has been applied by generations of K-12 teachers and college instructors in their teachings across the United States of America and in other developed countries. This framework revolves around six major categories, most of which are rare across the length and breath of our educational system.
What we focus at home is rote learning–the ability to reproduce the content after cramming it. Sadly, it is even celebrated as our exams are tailored to test this very ability.
Premium schools in Pakistan even struggle to fully implement Bloom’s leaning pedagogies in their classrooms. The teachers are barely trained and the administration lacks the will. Only those lucky ones who have educated parents or who can afford to have coaching classes develop some concepts of the subjects they are learning.
For the rest; there is no option other than spend their precious life years at the first step in Bloom’s taxonomy–i.e. memorising the content. Childrens’ cognitive, affective and psychomotor abilities are hardly assessed and hence never polished in true spirit.
Our current teaching methodologies cries for improvement. Applying Blooms’ taxonomy in our teaching and assessment can help. Or else the crisis will linger on. Blooms’ taxonomy consists of six major categories starting from the knowledge of the child and progressing towards comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and finally leads to the evaluation.
The categories after knowledge are presented as ‘skills and abilities’, with the understanding that knowledge was the necessary precondition for putting these skills and abilities into practice. The stepwise increase in the expectations for the child to perform; results in the child’s enhanced multi-dimensional abilities as the child progresses in his school years.
Take an example: a rote learning system requires students to memorise a verse from the holy book. A system based on Bloom’s taxonomy will ask about the implicit and explicit message in the verse and how this verse can be applied in our present time.
Currently, our education system even on paper fails to address these categorical developments of our children. The education in the schools is memory-based with no mechanism to check how much the student has actually learned. Exams again only tests the ability to parrot details and reproduce them without missing a word.
All this has resulted in learning poverty, estimated at 79% by the World Bank report in 2020, where students are progressing classes year by year but are unable to develop. The situation in higher education institutes is not much different as well.
Its time we stop making a mockery of our kids’ time and education in the country.