Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon remarked “Knowing is not about remembering and repeating information but it is about finding and using information”. Even a serious onlooker of education would agree with this statement. As technology and human competence acquires new levels of proficiency every passing hour; the monotony of repeated information and its casual storage becomes meaningless. Survival in this era is more aligned to the abilities of finding and using the relevant information more accurately and with enhanced speed. Has the transition from the old phase of storage and retrieval to the new phase of search and usage been completed? For that matter has it even started in many of our educational institutions? Why we fail to see the eventuality is a serious concern that needs to be addressed. In the earlier days education was a luxury and for many it was not something that decided the survival of the individual. But today the story is different education becomes a mandatory tool for survival. How much have we managed to move away from the earlier days and innovated to address the challenges of today? We still follow the age old methods of assessment wherein we just test the individual about her/his memory retrieval. The technique does not change according to the times. We don’t test the individual about her/his capacity to find information. The Science of Learning is providing knowledge to improve significantly people’s abilities to become active learners who seek to understand complex subject matter and are better prepared to transfer what they have learned to new problems and settings. This transfer of knowledge to address any new challenge and the subsequent application of the acquired knowledge in any setting is the real purpose of education in today’s world. Why we fail to do this is the dilemma being faced by the stakeholders of education.

In the earlier days education was less about technology and had more to do with language and its applications. Memorizing and retrieving the same from the memory was stressed more. The mode of transmission of knowledge and the methods of assessment were invariably focused on memory enhancing techniques and the repeat of information already gathered. The survival of the individual was more focused on instincts than on learning or its applications. The modern era has thrown up a much complex living landscape with greater stress on technology and its usage for the betterment of humanity. Mere memorizing and retrieval won’t help the individual to survive in this complicated landscape. We still get away with the ‘A’ for Apple kind of learning. Why can’t we let our children search for words with the ‘A’ sound instead? When our children are encouraged to perform such activities, they get an idea about using the information that they receive in their day to day existence. Any information gathered is to be fine tuned, processed and made use of. This also invokes in the children a sense of curiosity and a hunger to know more which is really essential in making learning fun and challenging. Children are by nature curious and it is only our monotonous and rugged ways of imparting knowledge that really puts cold water on their curiosity and curbs their natural instinct to learn. We as facilitators of knowledge are supposed to listen to each child, help her/him test the validity of information gathered by them, and in necessary situations guide them towards the factual correctness of the information gathered by them at each point of their activities. The most important aspect of learning is that whatever information the child gathers is to be used at appropriate circumstances, and knowledge acquisition is not a robotic process that is to be directed only towards the examination end.
Our learning environments need more zest and the focus should shift from testing memory to interpretation and application of the information transferred by the system and gathered from the environment. The human mind is constantly searching for information, and this quest for knowledge is part of the survival techniques adopted by humans. The child is so fascinated by the amount of information surrounding her/him in various forms. We as teachers and parents are entrusted with the responsibility of letting the child explore and use this information in a meaningful way. The current system only focus on giving them packaged information and the contents of this package has been designed is such fashion that the information provided are stereotyped and redundant. We never let our children roam outside the strict boundaries of these packaged information. Each child is blessed with her/his unique abilities-the idea of imparting knowledge is to identify these unique abilities of our children and to let them explore it further. Then learning becomes a fascinating and rewarding experience. The creation of such a learning environment will infuse in our children the belief that knowing is about finding and using information.

• Digg
• Stumble it!
• Reddit

• Emotions And Learning
• Creating Intelligent Schools