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| EDUCATION TRIBUNE |
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Shaping youth of tomorrow
Early puzzle play can help boost spatial skills |
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Shaping youth of tomorrow EDUCATION is the backbone of any society, since it performs the vital functions of informing, socialising and civilising the young minds who are gradually getting into the spaces, both private and public, where significant decisions are going to be made. In other words, it is this youth, the target group of education system in any society, which shall be giving a shape to the future social system, including the economic, political and cultural. But as a matter of fact, the educational system comprising schools, colleges, universities and other technical institutions happens to be just one segment of the broader system that educates the young minds. The other segments include family, neighbourhood, media, market, religion, polity and so on. It is generally assumed that the spaces where our youth are imparted education are only the classrooms, with teachers at the steering, leading the process. A few decades ago, these spaces no doubt comprised the most important segment out of all others, the family and neighbourhood coming next, since the youth had little exposure to either market or media. Their interface with religion and polity was by and large mediated through the family. On the other hand, today’s young brigade has a direct, uninterrupted and continuous interface with market, media and polity, while the family and the school have been pushed to the background. Both education and market/media have youth as the most important target group but with a subtle difference. So far as our country is concerned, it is liable to universalise education which is a national goal and for that the numbers matter the most. Having worked on school enrolment figures, the global pressures through quality control measures have forced India to enhance its enrolment ratio in higher education. This endeavour is being pursued by increasing the number of higher educational institutions all over the country, resulting into higher enrolment. Going back to the issue, while the stakeholders in educational institutions, teachers being most pertinent, have no personal interest in educating the students, beyond completing (or not) the syllabi in the privacy of classrooms, the stakeholders in market and media successfully and aggressively reach out to the target youth. The inputs as well as incentives in both the ventures therefore are quite varied, differently motivated and ignited. The results are bound to be different too. Education in this sense thus is lackluster, frivolous, dispensable and uninteresting. What these institutions in fact are imparting is not education but mere information, without any context, value frame or relevance. Under these circumstances, the zeal with which the stakeholders in the corporate sector work, with commercial stakes lying high, has no match with their counterparts in the educational sector. The consequence is a complete trivialisation of education not only in its content but even its essentiality. If education is just information, one can have it through online programmes or open schools/universities, as per one’s own convenience. In fact, going to a particular school or college or university has primarily become a matter of status symbol. With a huge premium placed on the brands, that too the international ones, thanks to globalisation, one opts for a school or university, mainly for the tag that it carries. In such a system, one can very well understand the plight of a school or college situated in a remote rural area, attended by all those (including teachers as well) not having access to the better ones. How can one expect them to deliver quality education, when they too are restlessly waiting for an opportunity to move to the core, in an earnestness to join the bandwagon? The most important question is, does education really imply dissemination of information only? What about the live experience of having a teacher in flesh and blood, who does not just pass on information but is ideally supposed to guide and direct the students not only towards their goals but even the means they should adopt. Has the teaching community completely surrendered before the market and media, choosing the most convenient option? This is the reason why a teacher has lost the glory he/she had been enjoyed through ages. In order to actually educate the highly exposed, intelligent and difficult students, teachers have to be ahead of them in knowledge (not just information), communication, interpersonal skills and self-confidence. In the name of democracy and individualism, it has been foolish for teachers, especially in higher educational institutions, to throw away the authority that naturally goes with their profession. Yes, a teacher is supposed to be the greatest friend of his/her students, most trustworthy of all, but does that mean only gossiping, smoking and drinking with them, with a non-interfering attitude at a time when they need an advice? Respecting others’ privacy in no way implies a lack of empathy and concern, especially when the other (student in this case) desperately needs it. Even a robot can impart information, but only a human teacher is competent enough to contextualise the knowledge and deliver it to the young minds in an absolutely objective manner. (Ab)using the classroom for poisoning the young minds with a particular political ideology is no less than a crime, for which not only the teachers but the whole society has to pay a huge price. Therefore, in the process of education, both means and ends are equally important. Not only what is being taught, but how it is taught makes all the difference. It is imperative thus that education is not any kind of business; it is no business in fact. It is the most significant segment of a society, which makes or breaks the future of a society. With the commercialisation taking the front seat through both the media and market, it is all the more important that the education system is revitalised, with the most competent (in knowledge and wisdom) minds being entrusted with educating the young boys and girls just not towards making more and more money but developing critical abilities to shape a future society that is actually civilised. And for that, we certainly cannot afford to trivialise education!
The writer is Chairperson, Departments of Sociology and Women’s Studies,
Panjab University, Chandigarh |
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Early puzzle play can help boost spatial skills
WASHINGTON: Engaging children in puzzle play can help in the development of spatial skills, which has implication for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers later in their life, say experts. A study by University of Chicago researchers has found that children who play with puzzles between ages 2 and 4 later develop better spatial skills. Puzzle play was found to be a significant predictor of spatial skill after controlling for differences in parents’ income, education and the overall amount of parent language input. “The children who played with puzzles performed better than those who did not, on tasks that assessed their ability to rotate and translate shapes,” said psychologist Susan Levine, a leading expert on mathematics development in young children. The ability to mentally transform shapes is an important predictor of STEM. Activities such as early puzzle play may lay the groundwork for the development of this ability, the study found. For the research, 53 child-parent pairs from diverse socio-economic backgrounds participated in a longitudinal study, in which researchers video-recorded parent-child interactions for 90-minute sessions that occurred every four months between 26 and 46 months of age. The parents were asked to interact with their children as they normally would, and about half of the children in the study were observed playing with puzzles at least once. Higher-income parents tended to engage children with puzzles more frequently. Both boys and girls who played with puzzles had better spatial skills, but boys played with more complicated puzzles than girls, and the parents of boys provided more spatial language during puzzle play and were more engaged in play than the parents of girls.
— ANI |
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Campus NoteS
Guru Jambheshwar University of
Science and Technology, Hisar A former Director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Jagdeep S. Chhokar, said the corporates could play an important role in the development of management education worldwide. In his keynote address to the annual national conference on "Business and Management" that concluded at the Haryana School of Business of Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology, he said integration of practical training and simulation in management education would make it socially relevant. He said the corporate world demanded global level of competence in managers. Business schools should pay special attention to this aspect and work with corporates to improve the system of business education. The Vice-Chancellor of GJU, Dr M. L. Ranga, said management educators and scholars should interact regularly to learn from their experiments, experiences and concerns to improve the quality of management education. A book edited by S. C. Kundu, B. K. Punia, Karam Pal and Dalbir Singh, "Business Management: Key Research Issues", and another book by R. S. Jaglan and Karam Pal, "University Administration and System in India", were also released during the inaugural session. More than 250 delegates from different parts of the country participated in the conference. About 40 resource persons from institutions of academic and professional repute oversaw the technical sessions of the conference. Twenty technical sessions on different functional areas of business management addressed issues relating to finance and accounting, marketing, human resource and total quality management.
Varsity don wins award
Dr Dinesh Dhingra, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology, has been awarded Prof. P.C. Dandiya Endowment Trust Prize for Best Publication Award in Pharmacology for biennial 2010 and 2011. This prize was awarded to Dr Dhingra during the 20th Prof. P.C. Dandiya Oration held at SMS Medical College, Jaipur recently. The research papers in pharmacology published during 2010 and 2011 were invited by Prof. P.C. Dandiya Endowment Trust from all over the country for the best publication award in pharmacology. The research publications of Dr Dinesh Dhingra were adjudged the best. CCS Haryana Agricultural
University, Hisar The Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) has entrusted the task of evaluating wheat germplasm lines deposited in gene bank at NBPGR, New Delhi, to Haryana Agricultural University. Under this evaluation programme, the potential germplasm lines will be identified to develop short duration, heat-tolerant, disease-resistant, high protein and high yielding varieties of wheat for various agro-climatic conditions in India. To carry out the evaluation, a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) was signed between NBPGR and HAU. Vice-Chancellor K. S. Khokhar said the environmental changes were likely to increase the pressure on Indian agriculture, in addition to the ongoing stresses of yield stagnation, competition for land and water use and globalisation. It was estimated that by 2020, food grains requirement would almost be 35 per cent more than the current demand. This would have to be produced from the same or even the shrinking land and depleting water resources. Wheat was one of the main food grain crops of India. Increasing temperatures and changes in rainfall pattern were impacting wheat production. Therefore, lot of efforts were being made at the ICAR and the universities level to face the emerging challenges of soil health, water scarcity and climate change, so that the momentum of increasing wheat production was maintained. He said the evaluation programme was the beginning of the exercise.
— Contributed by Raman Mohan |
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Armed Forces
Indian Air Force, Central Airmen Selection Board, PO Box No 11807, New
Delhi 110010 Senior Non-Commissioned Officer in Group ‘X’ (Education Instructor) Trade Eligibility: Unmarried
/ married Indian / Nepal males; BEd and 2 years teaching experience: Selection: Written Test: April 2011; Physical Fitness Test; Interview; Medical Exam. Application Form: Send
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Trades, Application Deadline: 02 March 2012 Engineering
Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, A 10, Sec 62, Noida 201307 1) BTech (4
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AIEEE 2012 IT
National Institute of Technology, Warangal – 506 004, Andhra Pradesh NIMCET – 2012 Eligibility:
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Statistics / Discrete Mathematics / Mathematical Foundations of
Computer Science / Computational Maths / Elementary Maths / Elementary
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Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067 BA (Hons) in Foreign
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National Law University, Sector – 14, Dwarka, New Delhi – 110078,
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in Competition Policy and Law (6
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Sciences – General
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& MSc (Engg) Eligibility: For
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