The year is 2022. A colleague’s child scores 95% in her Class 12 exams. It is the milestone to get her into a college of esteem. The family celebrates. Elsewhere, her friend scores a 98%. His family rejoices. But she is dejected. She spirals into an emotionally fragile state. Nobody knows why.
Families, just like education institutions, are driven by the ‘triumph of marks’. Success is equated with ranks, grades, and a percentile that depicts how many students their child has left behind. Students navigate examination after examination, pressurised and obliged to do better, eliminate competition. But what ensues once the question paper vanishes? What follows when there’s no exam left to ‘crack’?
Faced with multifaceted challenges that the world throws at them, children struggle to be decisive, deal with failure, recognise that a loved one is in crisis, or simply experience fragility in the rapidly transforming world.
In contemporary India, when physical, technological, and emotional crises engulf an individual, marks rarely matter. What may matter instead, is the ability to survive and thrive in adversities.
Natural and social disasters like the recent unprecedented floods, development induced climate change, abject poverty, bio-hazards like corona that took away lives, exclusion of minority communities from social development, debilitating human relationships at the workplace, artificial intelligence replacing human workers, increasing suicide rates – a continuous series of relentless enervating phenomena surround the modern-day individual. In this sense then, how does a person live well and live responsibly?
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines life skills as “abilities for adaptive and positive behaviour that enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.”
Its framework includes decision-making, problem-solving, critical and creative thinking, communication and interpersonal skills, self-awareness, empathy, and coping with stress and emotion (Source: World Health Organization [WHO], 1997). Thus, to answer the previously posed question, nurturing life skills becomes pivotal for higher education institutes today.
Conclusively, classrooms must focus on what students experience, feel, and express; even if simultaneously calculating numerically measurable indicators. Experiential learning must not remain a peripheral extracurricular but become integrated into teaching pedagogy.
Educators operating with a hierarchal stance and learners being passive recipients must change into the creation of meaningful, thought-provoking dialogue in the classroom. Classrooms must become spaces that ask “are students future-ready?”
A recent theatre-driven workshop led by me, an educator, and organised by NEF College, Saukuchi, Guwahati -offered a small but meaningful illustration of what such pedagogy can achieve.
The workshop shifted away from the established lecture format, and positioned students at the centre of the learning process.
Students worked in teams and demonstrated excellent engagement as they brainstormed, performed, and created solutions to problems faced on ‘field’ (fieldwork or working with communities, NGOs, private and government-driven non-profit ventures, to create social transformation is a core component of the social work curriculum, which calls for experiential learning).
Students identified that their role as citizens of the future and professional social workers would place them in circumstances where only life skills help navigate intense situations.
One of the students Dolly (identity changed for confidentiality), narrated her experience as an intern doing fieldwork in a rural community. During a workshop with women participants on domestic violence, in the said community, one of the husband’s was adamant and even aggressive to pull his wife out of the session and take her home.
She was inspired by the social workers’ team’s persistent presence of mind that tackled the situation, while also preventing chaos in the community. She and the other students dissected the situation and recounted that such spontaneity cannot only be taught from books.
Working with people requires a lot more. Listening, mindful observation, empathy, resilience, consciousness of prejudice, and coordinated action make social workers sail in such scenarios.
Thus, the larger conversation in educational institutions should ask “who will you become?” rather than asking “how much did you score”? Marks could be a part, but not the definition of education.
Where learners are met with experiences that show them a glimpse of the real world, kinaesthetically stimulating pedagogy of learning like theatre; may not only create awareness of one’s surroundings but empower the students’ mind. This would make them life-ready citizens of the state, the country, and consequently, the world.
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue.
Also Read: India’s BRICS moment: Building the bloc, funding the future
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