A New Curriculum — Origins
One can rely on memory only to a certain extent but it wouldn’t be too much of a departure from what truly must have happened. It all began when the visionary founder of Purkal Youth Development Society (PYDS), Mr. Gopal Krishnaswamy (more popularly known as Mr. G.K.Swamy or Swamy-sir) shared his displeasure with what the board results seemed to indicate. He is, as of this writing, near his mid-80’s and has his foundations in an era which had very different value-systems. While I am not from that age, I do share his dismay at students who score 98% in English and can barely string a meaningful sentence in a conversation or those who score 100% in Economics & can barely explain the differences between debt and equity or a student securing 95% in Mathematics struggling to compute 40% profit on a value of 105 (real examples from the quizzing Swamy-sir did of 12th grade students after the board exams). This was found to be mostly true across schools, states and boards. This has also been bemoaned by many a writer/thinker culminating in the questioning of our education system.
Swamy-sir approached it slightly differently. He wanted to aspire for more than what CBSE expected. He wondered whether we could be working towards something unique whereby excelling in CBSE board exams could be a desirable side-effect. He wasn’t focusing only on the academic side of things. He was very particular about physical fitness and well-being as well, not to mention oratory and other skills. He kept calling it Holistic Learning but that was the term most institutions and schools were using to sell their wares. While some looked into other boards, I was particularly drawn to revisiting the question itself. Questions I asked myself included:
- What makes something unique?
- Can there be uniqueness in education irrespective of the student? Should there be attempts at such a “uniqueness” (where a student is being entirely dismissed)?
- If the roadmap/curriculum cannot be made unique, what else can be? The student? How?
- What makes a student unique?
- What makes a person unique?
- What makes someone uniquely PYDS-ian?
It is with such questions that I invited the School Management to imagine a person they meet some place. What aspects/qualities/mannerisms/behaviour/grooming/perspective of the person makes you feel that this person might be a PYDS-ian? The members deliberated on this, shared their choice adjectives and then voted on their top choices.
While I have explored the philosophical aspect of why focus on qualities in an earlier post, I would like to share thoughts around how we went about picking qualities, differentiating between qualities and values, specific vs generic qualities, etc.
At one end of the spectrum, we could simply say “A good human” as the sole identifying characteristic of that stranger one meets as indicating an association with PYDS. “Goodness” is too vague and is especially confusing when we expect teachers to carry out the curation of experiences and exploration of phenomena. We needed more specific qualities.
Honesty, generosity, kindness, diligence (hardworking), spirituality, ethical, etc. are fundamental qualities. In many ways, these are foundational and pervade our many acts. Each are not just of word but of thought, action and intent as well. These need focus but are too vital to be differentiators. The fact that they suffuse our actions and thoughts implies a different treatment.
One question that came up was “How many qualities?”. We could list 99 of them but that is too much for teachers and students to handle. As stated earlier, 1 quality makes it too vague. An important realisation is in that any number we decide on there will always be one more that would make our “education” more “holistic”. Holistic is a moving target. We were quick to realise that & drop our quest for the “true holistic education”. We had to pick enough to be specific but not more than that lest we overwhelm teacher and student.
We also had to ensure that the qualities had an element of timelessness about them. They shouldn’t be qualities that were relevant & valuable only for the next 10 years. They also had to be qualities of a good citizen and not merely employable qualities (although employability is a key concern for the demographics at PYDS — we are a school exclusively for the economically underprivileged students of the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand). They had to have the qualities of a change-maker.
9 is the highest single digit number & hence, I thought 9 it should be.
Once these were articulated, I set down to work on how these would be detailed and developed. There was a lot of work to be done. A quick plan of implementing this was shared with the board of directors and they were definitely pleased with the thought and planning that had gone into it. Sadly, this project was shelved although I continued my research. This project has been resurrected towards the tail-end of Feb 2020 only to face the challenges of COVID-19.
Future posts will go into what each quality means & develops, means for developing each, building this curriculum and much more.
