By Volunteer Preetham Murva, FHI Bangalore
Importance of conventional education system
Why am I being made to learn things that will never be of any use for me in life? I’m sure we all have had this question. Now when I look back at the conventional textbook education I received, it doesn’t seem to be very relatable but has instilled numerous skills in me, to name some – cognitive, visualization, critical thinking, problem-solving etc. Since we are not exposed to the real-world problems during our childhood, conventional education provides us a flavor of the same in a safe and controlled environment.
Having answered the question of the importance of Conventional Education for myself, I set out to find the answer to the next question that surfaced “How to make learning engaging and fun?”
What is change?
Out of several definitions and synonyms for change, one that I really liked was “Transform” this word summarizes the importance of change. Anything that undergoes a change is said to undergo a transformation. Simply put, change in anything, is something that is different from what it is.
Importance of change
In order to discuss the importance of change, me having been a sports enthusiast all my life, I’ll take an example of a local Basketball club’s coach in Bangalore.
I was an amateur local club football player and my team had planned practice sessions 4-5 times a week (me being the most regular, typical me). Our practice sessions were followed by the Basketball practice sessions every day. The Basketball team was really skillful and with very good individual players who gelled well as a team too. As time went by I witnessed the trend of this team winning trophies continuously, but losing out on their important players. The drop out of one player resulted in many others dropping out. There might be several reasons for these dropouts but the Basketball coach took it upon himself to take some action upon it.
There were just 2 changes he made to the sessions – Introduced in Dodgeball as a part of the warm up activity and regularly challenged players to practice with a heavier ball.
Thinking about it, both are logical changes; Dodgeball, a team activity that is fun, competitive, involves a lot of movement, strategy, throwing and catching sounds a bit like basketball, doesn’t it?
Challenging oneself by practicing with a heavier ball forced physical adaption. After dribbling with a heavier ball, doing the same with a normal one seemed easier.
What impact did this have? Gradually we could see an increase in turn up, players couldn’t wait to play dodgeball, their throwing, catching and dribbling skills got better, their ability to tackle different situations got better as they could adapt to change quicker, they were more of a team now than they ever were.
What does this teach us? Change is important to break the monotony, to re-energize, to re-collect and to challenge ourselves. Above all, what change teaches us is to accept failures, which in my view, probably is the most important skill. When we start doing something new, we are rarely ever good at it, we put ourselves through the process of building from zero every time.
FHI – Bringing about a change in learning and resulting in Transformation
At FHI, we understand the role that conventional education plays in the life of children. We appreciate the work that the organization bodies and putting in to provide the same to the children. We aim to coexist with this system in order to introduce changes in the process of teaching and learning through our activity-based programs.
Change according to me is a performance enhancing pill, enhancing being the important word. We build upon the foundation built by conventional education. Lastly as they say, Change is inevitable but with FHI, change is a transformation and transformations are good.
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