Cutting one corner too many..

As a country, its always been our habits to cut corners, to figure out how to make processes shorter. If there is a queue, someone will figure it out how to expedite this line. From birth to death, school admissions to work, to menial daily jobs, its ingrained in our culture, the Jugaad Culture, we want to cut corners and get the work done. We don’t have patience for the detail and no time for the process.

You know the drill, if you are waiting in line and the it’s a single lane to the bridge, you will have someone make a double lane, then a third lane and then a fourth. All to get in the same line, so if you decide to wait the line and follow the process, you will be there like “ forever ”. This is us, unapologetic, unabashed and inconsiderate to the process and the system. This has paid dividends so far, there has been nothing lost, until now.

The last few years has seen this culture slowly penetrating into the Education System, and ours was already a fractured system. There is a push for us to believe that “ Learn Coding “ will accelerate our children’s career and make them into entrepreneurs and who knows the next Mark Zuckerberg. Words like AI and ML are casually thrown in jargon to confuse the parents and trap them into believing that beyond this is the promised land.

The government of India’s “ Atal Tinkering Lab “ is a fantastic initiative that promises to spread the reach of STEM Education across smaller cities, towns and enable students to experience tinkering with new age technologies, however with more focus on the hardware and less on the content and the fundamentals, this program is also treading dangerously away from being a national push on innovation and technology.

While there is no doubt, that learning to code is the future, to consider it to be the holy grail will not only be foolhardy, but it can also be counter productive. The Apps and Programs cannot replace school, they cannot partner with the kids, they can only aid and support the kids. Children will not become a tech entrepreneur after doing a 4 – 6 week program. They will need to code for hours, days and months together., they will need to get into the basics and fundamentals of programming. 

Irrespective of the fields they chose going ahead, they will be exposed to technology / automation and digitisation and to use as tools they will need to learn and understand parts of STEM Education.

STEM Education – There has never been such a large impetus for any education in the past 5 – 10 years as it has been for STEM Education. A vast field, a huge umbrella of which Coding / Robotics /3D Printing / AI etc all are small branches. 

Imagine our school system, its basically 5- 7 years of school learning Physics / Chem / Bio, (80 % theory)one or two years of learning Computers which some boards have theory of how to use the monitor / mouse / etc etc. Maybe a year of basic HTML / JAVA which will again be 50 % at least in theory. smh... as they say, the millennial.

Then the child gets say 80 % and enrolls in commerce post SSC exams. Bam – there goes his/her exposure anything remotely connected to STEM. It ends there.

So, given how given our education system, is more important for them to learn it in school, get exposure on how these technologies work, develop affinities and embrace them and take away the fear that these technologies / jargon's bring perceptively. Schools need to be geared up not only in the hardware, but also in the thought process, the teaching methodology, the mentoring, the curriculum and more importantly make learning these programs fun, interesting and challenging at the same time .I think that will be STEP 1.

Once most of the children have overcome the hurdle we would hope that we create a culture of technical learning, a culture that will bring and give birth to groups of children who would be really interested in these fields and will take these learning’s to the next level. Who will spend hours and hours not only mastering their craft, but also perfecting it and making these programs into sustainable solutions which can be scaled and then used, commercially or otherwise Or understand how technology can be used to improve & simplify lives.

For whatever its worth – Wikipedia says – “Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school.

So lets turn the full circle, we can leap frog technology and also use it to reach further and more, but we cannot cut corners in education.