Written by Sofiya Shahiwala
Answers make you the same, questions make you different’
Intending to spread our ideas unto a wider audience, we conducted an open seminar on 14th of July 2019, with the affiliation of The Karma Foundation and venue partner as Rash Cafe. The event was joined by a very supportive and interactive audience which included parents, students, as well as teachers(Delhi Public School, Ahmedabad).
The event began with a video clip shown to the audience, and an open-ended question thrown at them about why we think of ‘apple’ when asked for a word which stands for ‘a’. The reason behind this is undoubtedly the faults in our Education System.
We, as children, are sent into a competitive world at the young age of 2. We are then made to sit in front of a teacher and a board for four hours a day. I find this utterly absurd that everyone is taught the same topics regardless of their caliber and creativity. Everyone must have good marks in all the subjects irrespective of how their minds develop, and what their interests are. A child’s creativity gets cut down, and his true potential gets destroyed among the four walls of a classroom.
The host of the seminar, Dr. Megha Bhatt, then goes on to explain the various aspects and dimensions of science and learning. When a child sees something new, he always tries connecting the dots from his previous learning to the new situation at hand. That way, he figures out a process on his own and practices, by himself, modern and creative cognitive learning.
The students were exposed to Audio-Visual Clips, Live Demonstrations of experiments, and were encouraged to look for science behind things they do even on daily basis.
They were shown various pictures and from 20 students, about three of them recognized the scientific difference between the pictures – types of soil. However, the answers that were received show that the observational skills in all children are different and the only way that we get a larger perspective of any picture is by being different.
Right from when a child is born, he starts learning. His parents and the society start conditioning him upon how things must be, how tasks must be carried out, what he must say, what he must not. Moreover, these days, parents are getting more and more ignorant because of the advent of smartphones. A very significant and elementary fact quoted by Dr. Bhatt here is,If you’ll read, they’ll read. If you’ll be using the phone, they’ll be using the phone.
Approaching the end of the seminar, the students were given ideas to study smartly. Learning is the goal, but it’s your choice over which path do you want to travel. One can either mug-up or smartly plan out, compare, classify, and most importantly, relate theories with examples to study. One must always remember that he must be confident in his endeavors; Failure always leads to success.
To sum up, we, at SciKnowTech focus on encouraging the critical ability of children rather than sending them in the rat-race.