Skill-Driven Education — An Outline

There is so much to lay down and assemble into a coherent whole that I felt an outline might help (me, if not the reader).

Preface: This post has been long in the making. Trust me when I say that some of the points I had jotted in the draft were from the pre-NEP days. When the NEP was released, I had to rephrase some as the NEP, on paper, was voicing some of my beliefs.

Across the many drafts of this post, portions have been chopped off, added to the extent of a novella and then pruned and so on. There is a lot to cover and I fear that this introduction which is the culmination of past experiments and ruminations, might either be too cryptic or create an incorrect mental model which disallows the future articles to clarifies.

This post will restrict itself to the main drivers of this proposal and then lay down a sequence of future posts that are planned to go deeper into this subject.

Main Objective:

The intent of this series is to clearly define what it means to have a skill-driven education. I will provide a working definition out here and keep improving upon it over the course of the series.

Skill-driven education is an approach to learning which commences from exposure to and acquisition of physical skills in order to create shared contexts thereby facilitating extraction of cognitive and academic learning along with developing the necessary sensitivities and emotional resilience from these shared experiences.

All cognitive & psychomotor learning must be situated in such curated skill development exercises and similar experiences (e.g. trekking and trail walks). The leitmotiv is a simple admission that learning arising from necessity and shared contexts has inherent relevance and provides organic motivation. The shared context provides a natural reference to return to.

Vocational Training, Arunachal Pradesh

Why?:

There are essentially 3 reasons for designing this approach:

1. Skilled youth: Today, your common urban 17-year old has largely a singular skill of taking tests/exams. Pick this one up and drop her/him in a remote village and they will essentially have nothing to offer the residents. Why is this important? Our youth are progressively getting disconnected from manual work and skills thereby leaving their body underdeveloped and unsuited for any such work. When we lament the abysmal state of our college graduates and their unemployability, this rings loudest as the reason — we have not developed their skills. Before you object with “Oh! come on! Is carpentry or gardening skills really going to make our youth employable? Is that the kind of employability we want?” please realise that skills come in different shapes and forms but compose beautifully into complex skills which definitely will make our youth employable. Even if you care only about cognitive skills, the fact that they have years of practice of deriving and extracting cognitive skills and domain principles from life’s experiences make them better at solving problems and demonstrating vital skills like critical thinking, collaboration, empathy etc. In other words, they will cease to be bookish.
2. Developing vocational options: Today, a child is considered demoted if s/he is assigned to a vocational course. S/He is rarely assigned to vocational because of her/his abilities but rather because s/he is ‘inept’ at cognitive courses. Imagine a world where every child is part of learning skills, including vocational skills, from grade 1 every single day. This would then create some very skilled youth who can then choose a vocational course because of their being better suited for that rather than for some lacking. Since the child and her/his peers have been in the skill development since day 1, there is no shame or lessening of value. X took up vocational studies because X has amazing creative skills with wood and metal which Y doesn’t. Y decided to pursue academics because Y is better with cognitive activities and working in the abstract. They might later collaborate in a company that X sets up. Both X & Y are familiar with a range of skills (tens or hundreds) and have both developed the skills of extracting cognitive and academic learnings from these skills and the experiences that surround them. They have done gardening together and learnt biology and chemistry from the gardens and farms. They have done carpentry together and have learnt their language, mathematics and physics. They have learnt how to setup the electrical wiring in the house and have learnt their history and geography and physics from it and so on. They have developed this over a good 10 years and are very adept at it. This would also motivate the vocational programmes to be of higher quality and better geared towards entrepreneurship because they are now sought out by highly skilled, motivated, capable and aspirational youth and their families. If we didn’t do this, treating academic and vocational streams on an equal footing is mere lip-service and will simply never happen.
3. Community inclusion: Scores of skills and capabilities thrive in our communities. Be it metalwork or flower-festooning or paper manufacturing or handicrafts or skills required in running cottage industries and agricultural farms. The urban student can no longer be kept away from the rural spaces esp. if they aspire to rule over their fate through administrative ranks or tap into their markets. But even the urban spaces abound in skilled labourers who should be included in the education of our children. Imagine a watchmaker teaching our kids about gears and jewels and repairing watches while the teachers weave in literature about watchmakers and clocks and time and mathematics and physics and history of keeping time across ages (and tales like the one about Lilavati missing her wedding’s auspicious moment) and the geography of timezones and the technological advantage (of microseconds) of high-speed internet in financial trading etc. The children learn to respect the horologist (and the etymology of horology), gain an understanding into his life and how he makes ends meet, songs that he hums while working through his monocle and much more. Here is a context in which students have shared experiences and they extract learning from it, they develop sensitivities in it and they are skilled at repairing your watch and clocks. Imagine every member of society (bankers, janitors, lawyers, fruit-vendors, plumbers, et al) working with schools to share their skills (and they needn’t do it pro-bono).

What are the advantages:

Apart from the ones listed above, this approach to learning is inherently pandemic-proof. Think about it. With students having the ability to extract learning from any skill practice/acquisition and teachers adept at converting any such skill practice/acquisition into a learning experience a teacher could simply juggle the planned skills itinerary to now include accessible skills (cooking, cleaning, resource management, care-giving, etc.) in their lesson plans.

Any curriculum — CBSE, IB, IGCSE, CAIE — can be delivered via this mechanism. It is NEP 2020 compliant too!

It removes stigma from those who only possess skills but not a fancy accent or a swanky office with subordinates. Many homemakers/housewives, unfortunately, have lost sheen in the prevalent cognitive-heavy learning process.

In situating all learning in life’s experiences, students are repeatedly trained on reflecting on life’s experiences and extracting learning and messages from them. This builds a good metacognitive ability which most schools fail at developing. This also trains them to pick technical knowledge as well as philosophical insight. No student will ever declare “I have no clue why we studied X. I never use it!”

Finally, physical skills and dexterities are granted first class citizenship in education rather than being relegated to a failed-track of vocational learning or extra-curricular activities.

What Next:

Future posts in this series (each sub-heading below will convert to links to the corresponding post) would go into:

1. Roadmap Sampler: Building a sample experience roadmap from grades 1–10. This should give the reader/educator a taste of how commonly taught topics emerge from common skills.
2. Planning a Sample Year: This would also answer questions like “This is all fine but how would you ever be able to teach … from some skill like bicycle repair?” or “But how would we plan a year of these?”
3. Philosophical underpinnings: What is the philosophy behind this? Why is that important? What are we catering to?
4. Novelty of this approach: How is it different from PBL? Isn’t this merely Nai Taleem in a new garb?
5. Role of Play: We weave all of this to the centrality of play in learning.
6. Exploring inclusive education: How is skill-driven education a guaranteed way to more inclusive education?
7. A plausible structure: With the above foundation laid across many posts, it might be worth exploring a structure in a common school setup that might actually work.
8. Teacher professional development: An inevitable topic to be understood and documented to assess feasibility. Undoubtedly, this would segue into community professional development but isn’t that in the spirit of “it takes a village to raise…”?
9. Assessment and Progress: How does one assess and track/report on progress in this seemingly crowded learning environment? These and other vital issues will be addressed here.
10. Sundry: Leaving this as a spill-cup to collect whatever emerges but didn’t neatly fall into a post category.

I would love to hear your comments and concerns regarding this. It would only help me articulate better.