What is Formal Education

What if you compare the kind of teaching, assignments, exams in research institutions like IISER with that of our schools? If Government of India can think of IISER to change the quality of pure-science education in India, can we not think of changing quality of school education (of all subjects)? What can we do? I have some suggestions!

People ask me if real learning can emerge from formal education. I ask them if they have experienced true formal education. Can we judge the taste of Hyderabadi Biryani, if we have not experienced an authentic version of the same? How about Irani Chai or fruit biscuits? What then is the authentic education experience? In this post I'd like to make a case for a renaissance of (mass/mainstream) education and how all societal/educational problems can be solved by asking these important questions around "Philosophy of Education".

Let us see eight different experiences of formal education

1- Prof. Milind Watve of IISER Pune asks for a definition of life. We give him different requirements - grow, reproduce etc. He then asks if a computer virus is alive as it satisfies all our demands. He then talks of metabolic activities as a requirement which rules out viruses. Prof. K.P.Mohanan then asks if a mule or an old man is alive, since they are sterile and we put ability to reproduce as the criteria for life. They then explain why modern biologists are still debating a definition of life and why it is hard to define life.

2- Prof. R.Ramanujam, of IMSc Chennai, asks for a definition of Turing Machines and the students immediately parrot the one from standard textbooks. He asks why is the set of states finite. We are all like that's what all the textbooks say, he then asks if it is possible to define an infinite set Machine. He then comes up with a theorem that every infinite set Machine has a cousin finite set Machine and so it makes no sense to define infinite set Machines. He probably didn't plan this content and it just came up dynamically in the classroom while trying to bring in rigor to probe our assumptions.

3- Prof. Rajeev Karandikar, Founding Director of CMI Chennai, during his course at IISER, asks us what is the probability of a head when you toss a coin? We answer 0.5 and he asks why? We tell him that chance of a Head and a Tail are equal, total has to be 1. He asks why is the chance of a Head and a Tail equal? He asks what if he was a magician who is capable of bringing up more heads than tails? He then states probability is just a way of modelling reality and accuracy of your prediction depends on your assumptions.

4- Prof. Saurav Pal, former Director of NCL Pune, asks us for a definition of an orbital and we give him that long boring answer which textbooks provide. He then tells us that he asks this question during PhD interviews at NCL and nobody answers it correctly. He asks why we were beating around the bush, when the orbital is just "the probability distribution map of an electron". He then explains what those words mean, from the basics.

Prof. Saurav Pal also tells us about interdisciplinary approach to Science. He says all that can be explored by a Mathematician in Mathematics is explored, so if you're a Physics student, go into anything except Physics- search for application of Physics in other disciplines. He also tells us about importance of Metaphysics and how it inspires us think deep.

5- Prof. L.S.Shashidhara, Deputy Director of IISER Pune, while commenting about importance of freedom of speech, tells us that it is not the number of tigers which matter but the diversity of tigers matters. He tells us that if all the tigers are of the same kind and if a disease outbreaks, all of them would be wiped out. He uses this argument to explain that while we may disagree with some political voices, it is important to have space for diverse voices.

Prof. Shashidhara tells the students, in the 1st year, our exams are anyways easy, don't just focus on exams, go to the library, work with the faculty in the labs. At the end of 2nd year, he tells us, go for breadth and not depth, you can always get the depth later, but this is time for you to acquire breadth across disciplines, to see interdisciplinary perspectives.

6- Dr. Sutirth Dey, of IISER Pune, who happened to be our hostel warden had a very different idea of beating kids' home sickness. He asked us why a bus conductor doesn't develop muscles even though he technically exercises every day. We used to have interesting informal discussions with him. He led various student activities and had beautiful questions in the exam- construct your own hypothesis (theory) to explain the observations and design an experiment to test your hypothesis.

7- Dr. Rama Mishra of IISER Pune talks about generalizations in Mathematics. She tells us that we first attempt it in one dimension, we look for two, three dimensions and then n-dimensions. She tells us that we eventually take our Mathematics into Philosophy.

8- Dr. M.V.Panduranga Rao of IIT Hyderabad tells me how to read a research paper. He says it is just an abuse of notation but the idea is actually very simple. The same symbol is used to convey two or three different ideas and it would be difficult for an undergraduate student to make out that difference, due to lack of experience of reading papers. So that I required was endurance to get through the jargon and notation. I may not have done much in that project, but it helped in future projects where I had to read papers.

These people were able to come up with these deep perspectives and inspire kids to see the aesthetics of their discipline, because they are pushing themselves to see depth of truth, on a daily basis, being renown researchers in their field.

Coming to school education, we tend to focus too much on child psychology. It is important to understand a child, but it is equally important to understand what learning is. Learning is deep-sense making of curricular contents.

Formal Education includes the following, which doesn't feature in schools

1- Deep Philosophical debates around definitions, "senseless" questions. One language teacher complains that a child asked her "why should I marry" when she was explaining matriarchy and patriarchy. A Professor would rather connect it to Philosophy and bring more depth to the contents. Students fundamental questions enable contextualization of content.

2- Inter-disciplinary projects connecting different subjects. I was allowed to do a Mathematics project with a Biology faculty on a Social Studies topic.

3- Open ended questions in the classroom which provoke students to think and construct the meaning by themselves. The learner discovers the philosophical essence of the chapter all by self. The Prof is a catalyst who channelizes students' thought process by posing questions as hints for student sense-making of curricular content.

4- Creative examinations which do not have room for rote-learning. They bring in questions from levels 4/5/6 of Bloom's Taxonomy, in the true sense. For instance, IISER Pune once asked "The MHRD Minister said that Darwin's Theory of Evolution is not true because nobody saw a monkey turn into a human. Can you explain why this is not a valid scientific criticism? PS: We are not asking why scientists believe in the theory, we are asking why this is not a valid scientific criticism." . Questions of this kind test the students ability to bring ideas into different situations and use them for decision making.

5- Grilling sessions- The faculty grill students with counter questions and the depth of understanding can be probed by checking the students ability to think on their feet and to respond to new questions which they never exposed to earlier, by using the knowledge which they acquired in the classroom

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The author Tarun implements DeepThought School which brings ideas from world's best universities to school level. www.sciensation.tv/pdf/DeepThoughtSchoolImplementation.pdf