Is *better learning* possible at schools?
Simple Rant from a Parent!
I firmly believe that Every Student deserves to get the best education possible. Period.
Lot is being said about how the education system in India is lacking in providing good quality education and we have seen a flurry of EdTech companies some doing really innovative solutions for improving education and some more of a profit/VC centers. But I always wonder can we fix schools? What can schools do with the help of EdTech companies?
Today I went on a bit of a rant on Twitter regarding this -
To my surprise, I got some excellent replies pointing out flaws or roadblocks in our education system but also information about few institutes, people working hard towards this direction. Do read the thread and follow me on Twitter - https://twitter.com/vishweshji (a bit of a self-plug :D)
As a parent is it wrong to expect this from the education system in which we let our kids spent most of their growing years? How many of us can actually afford to pay the exuberant costs for trying some of the innovative solutions out there in the market like https://www.synthesis.is/ or similar? Why most of the EdTech companies are after proving they are better than schools rather than fixing them? Will school become irrelevant after few years?
A lot of such questions bother me and I feel they are important. I feel why can’t some of the brilliant minds in the industry and veterans come together to solve this problem? For the system, for the society, For schools!
In our country, India schools still have the highest reach from the richer or rich to the poorer of poor (financially) in the society have access to some kind of school (at least that’s what government claims) then shouldn’t we be fixing them instead of building more businesses around them?
I hope one day!
I would love to hear your views on this, so mail me or comment here.
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Let us connect someday and chat on this topic. I think Nikhil Karkare and you / me should talk or do something like a small pilot with one existing school.
I know even non-profits and social organisations try to fix bits and pieces but yes not anyone who like to fix the full system altogether.
When you try to do that...after a point it seems let me build the school instead and than the scale part of fixing schools for everyone vanishes.
Neeru Khosla venture in US tried to do via digital publishing of books and Salman Khan of Khan academy has done great job with videos to explain lot of concepts. There are many doing great job in bits and pieces that are all relevant and useful to all schools. Sadly even this isn’t being used by every school well - this is also a simple problem to fix and this isn’t a need for Ed-tech company. But there is a need to empower or educate teachers...to leverage and use all these stuff just the way they used zoom / microsoft team in the past year. Now we have this to repeat a lot of times so that school system improvise themselves.