The content below is from a student in India.

1. What is the relevance of school curriculum for you? Do you want any change in it?

For me the school curriculum is irrelevant. Being a student of class 11 i have got a chance to choose my subjects but we have to follow certain guidelines of our cbse board. I think i must be given a chance to choose any subject of my interest.

The board should not force us when we have to choose our career.

2. Do you feel alienated in the present education system? If yes why?

Sometimes espcially at the time of competition. Whenever i try to compare myself with students of different schools from different countries I mainly find that they have more practical knowledge of the subject.

3. How would you like to have your child educated in future?

My child must be given independence to learn anything of his choice that is beneficial. Their education must be involved with co-curricular activities from root level.

4. How do you differentiate between education and learning?

According to me learning and education are very different from each other. Education is mainly based on what you read from books and learning involves book knowledge as well as experience based learning from your past.

Name: Navneesh Vashist
Class: 11th
School/College/inst: Delhi Public School, Sonepat

Education, like any societal driven institution, needs to change with the times. One thing that struck me in our readings this week in Blake was that our current educational process was forged out of the needs of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution demanded that schools educated students to be followers, not leaders. Students needed to learn facts to be able to produce materials under the directions of management that needed brawn over brains. Schools in essence had the job of making workers instead of scholars.

Today’s educative process depends on the shift of an economy that depends on scholars that need to use their intellectual abilities rather than their muscles. We need to find solutions to problems, ways to improve our infrastructures, and solutions to move from a society of consumption to a world of conservation and protecting the environment. To do so we need to stress schools that will make our students better thinkers and entrepreneurs of ideas.

From an educational leadership perspective, we need to make teachers, parents, students and leaders part of a team of specialists. We need a way to devise a process of creating viable and interesting apprenticeships for students that will develop their interests into ways to make a living as well to contribute to a world that will need innovation to survive.

One way of doing this is based on the idea presented in the Map of Future Faces Affecting Education model presented in this module. We need a process of distributed innovation. Distributed innovation depends on a think-tank approach. This includes solution markets, incubators of new ideas, creative commons where people come together to find new methods of solving problems, experts, entrepreneurs and productive deviants

Who are willing to buck the status-quo to bring innovation to education.

Where do we start? We need to change our curriculum from a fact-based system to a process of building individual strengths of each and every student. To do so we will need teams of teachers who have specialty roles such as content experts, learning coaches, classroom managers and cognitive specialists. We need to change our classrooms from content based classes to a media-rich center of education that will totally immerse students in learning what is important to them. Learning needs to be reality based in game playing scenarios such as building better cities, ways to prevent pollution and creating jobs for people based on their strengths rather than just production of things.

To accomplish this change we will need to effectively scrap an educational system that demoralizes and incapacitates innovation and individual contributions toward a new society of the future.

Blake, N., Smeyers, P., Smith, R. & Standish, P. (1996). Thinking again: education afterpostmodernism. Bergin and Garvey. Westport, Conneticut/London.

The 2006-2016 Knowledgeworks Foundation. Map of Future Forces Affecting Education.http://www.kwfdn.org/map/map.aspx Accessed 10-18-2008